Introduction to this Translation

Two Hundred Years Together is a two-volume historical essay by Nobel Price

winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dealing with the Russian-Jewish
relations from 1795, leading up to the Communist revolution (Vol. 1) and then
through to 1995 (Vol. 2). The original Russian volumes were first published in
2001 and 2002 respectively. French (Fayard, 2002) and German (HERBIG,
2003) translations were published soon after, but until now only a partial
English translation of this remarkable work was available in The Solzhenitsyn
Reader: New and Essential Writings (Lanham, 2006).
The importance of a complete English translation has been discussed online
ever since the books were first published, and in October 2010 the first chapters
were posted online on a wordpress site called Adams Blog, however the owner
of that site received a warning by the copyright-holders in August 2011 and the
translation process stopped in its tracks.
It wasnt until January 2017 that voices showing the public interest in a full
English translation became loud enough that pseudonymous people took it upon
themselves to finish what had been started nearly a decade earlier.

This translation has been a combined effort by several people.

Chapters 4 and 5 from Volume 1, as well as Chapters 13, 14 and 16-27 were
translated pseudonymously by multiple people and posted online in 2010 at
https://200yearstogether.wordpress.com/. Some of these chapters did not have
English footnotes.
Chapters 2,3 and 6 through 12, as well as Chapter 15 have been translated
between February and March of the year 2017. They were made available
pseudonymously by David and Davina Davison at
https://twohundredyearstogether.wordpress.com. These chapters were translated
from French.
Chapter 1 is of unknown origin, it was posted on 8chan in pdf format.
Some footnotes from the French edition have been edited in. The translation for
this chapter is not complete and a better version will likely be made and
included in future editions of this work.
Other translations of some of these chapters can be found online. There
exists an alternative partial translation of chapters 2,3 and 6 from the original
Russian. I decided to use the one made by the Davisons because the writing was
of superior quality and no difference in the content was found.

If you find any errors in this publication, look for my contact details at The
Incorrect Library.

Shadilay, March 2017

 Introduction to the Material

Having worked with the history of the Russian revolution for fifty years, I have
encountered many times the problems between the Russians and the Jews.
Again and again they worked themselves into the happenings, drove a wedge
into the human psyche and whipped up passions.
I did not lose hope that an author would beat me to the punch and bring
forth, with the necessary amplitude and equilibrium, this bright spear. But we
are dealing more often with one-sided reproaches: either the Russians are guilty
against the Jews, worse, guilty of perpetual depravity, and rightly so; or, on the
other hand, the Russians who have treated this problem rationally have done so
for the most part excessively harsh, without giving the other party even the
slightest merit.
It cannot be said that there is a lack of publishers; notably among the
Russian Jewry, there they are far more numerous than amongst the Russians.
Nevertheless, despite the abudance of brilliant minds and decorated pens, we
still have not had a up-to-date analysis of our mutual history that can satisfy
both parties.
We must learn not to tighten the rope when it is already so tense.
I would have liked to apply my efforts to a subject less thorny. But I believe
this history or at least the effort to penetrate it should not remain
forbidden.
The history of the Jewish Problem in Russia (and Russia only?) is above
all else exceptionally rich. Talking about it means listening to new voices and
passing them on to the reader. (In this book, the Jewish voices will be heard
more often than those of the Russians.)
But the whirlwinds of the social climate force us towards the razors edge.
You can feel the weight of both sides, all the grievances and accusations,
plausible as well as improbably, which grow as they go.
The purpose that guides me throughout this work on the life common the
Russians and the Jews consists of looking for all the points necessary for a
mutual understanding, all the possible voices which, once we get rid of the
bitterness of the past, can lead us towards the future.
Like all other people, like all of us, the Jewish people is at the same time an
active and passive element of History; more than once they have accomplished,
be it unconsciously, important works that History has offered them. The Jewish
Problem has been observed from diverse angles, but always with passion and
often in self-delusion. Yet the events which have affected this or that people in
the course of History have not always, far from, been determined by this one
people, but by all those who surrounded it.
An attitude that is too passionately for one party or the other is humiliating
to them. Nevertheless, there cannot be problems that man cant approach with
reason. Speaking openly, amply, is more honest, and, in our case precise,
speaking about it is essential. Alas, mutual wounds have piled up in popular
memory. But if we look at the past, when will the memory heal? As long as
popular opinion does not find a pen to shed light thereupon, it will stay a vague
rumour, worse: menacing.
We cannot cut ourselves off from the past centuries permanently. Our world
has shrunk, and, whatever are the dividing lines, we find ourselves neighbours
again.
For many years I have delayed writing this book; I wouldve been glad not
to take this burden upon me, but the delays of my life have neared exhaustion,
and here I am.
I have never been able to acknowledge anyones right to conceal any of
what has been. Neither can I accept any agreement founded on bringing false
light on the past. I call both parties Russian and Jewish to look for mutual
understanding, to recognize each others share of the sin, because it is easy to
look away: surely this is not us I sincerely strive to comprehend the two
parties in the presence of this long historical conflict. I plunge myself into the
events, not the polemics. I want to show. I wont enter into the discussions
except for those extreme cases where fairness is covered by layers upon layers
of lies. I dare hope that this book will not be received by the extremists and the
fanatics, that, on the contrary, it will favour mutual understanding. I hope to find
caring people amongst the Jews as well as the Russians.
Here is how the author envisaged his task and ultimate goal: to try and
foresee, in the future of Russo-Jewish relations, accessible ways that could lead
to the good of all.
1995

I wrote this book by bending myself only on what the historical materials told
and looking for charitable issues for the future. But lets face it: in recent years
the situation in Russia has evolved in such a drastic fashion that the problems
studied herein have found themselves relegated to the background and dont
have the acuteness today of Russias other problems.
2000
 On the perimeter of this study

What could be the limits of this book?

I am fully aware of the complexity and breadth of the subject matter. I
understand that it also has a metphysical aspect. It is even said that the Jewish
Problem can be rigorously understood only from a mystical and religious point
of view. Of course I recognize the reality from this point of view, but, although
many books have already touched the subject, I think it remains inaccessible to
men, that it is by nature out of scope, even for the experts.
Yet all the important purposes of human history contain mystical
influences, this does not prevent us from examining them on a concrete
historical plane. I doubt whether we should necessarily call upon superiour
considerations to analyze phenomena which our within our immediate reach.
Within the limits of our earthly existence, we can make judgments on the
Russians, as well as on the Jews, starting from lowly criteria. As for those
above, lets leave them to God!
I want to clarify this problem only in the categories of History, politics and
everyday life and culture, and almost exclusively within the limits of the two
centuries of Russians and Jews living together in one state. Never would I have
dared to approach the depths of the Jewish History, tri- or quadri-millenniar,
sufficiently represented in numerous works and in meticulous encyclopedias.
Neither do I intend to examine the History of the Jews in the countries nearest
to us: Poland, Germany, Astria-Hungary. I concentrate myself on Russian-
Jewish relations, insisting on the twentieth century, so crucial and so
catastrophic in the destiny of our two peoples. Based on the hard experience of
our coexistence, I try to dispel the misunderstandings, false accusations, while
recalling the legitimate grievances. The works published in the first decades of
the twentieth century have had little time to embrace this experience in its
totality.
Of course, a contemporary author cannot overlook their existence, despite
half a century and the state of Israel as well as its enormous influence on the
lives of the Jews and other peoples over the globe. He cannot, if only if he
wants a extensive comprehension on the internal life of Israel and its spiritual
orientations also through incidental reflections, this must shine through in this
book. But it would be an outrageous claim on the part of the author not to
introduce here an analysis of the problems inherent to Zionism and the life of
Israel. I nevertheless give special attention to the writings published in our day
by the learned Russian Jews who lived for decades in the Soviet Union before
emigrating to Israel, and who have therefore had the opportunity to reflect, from
their own experience, on a number Jewish Problems.
 Abridged Mentions of the Main Sources Cited in Notes by
the Author

22: Social, political and literary review of the Jewish intelligentsia from the
USSR in Israel, Tel Aviv. The bibliographic notes called by a number are
from the author. Of these, those marked with an asterisk refer to a second-
hand reference. The explanatory notes marked with an asterisk are translators.
ARR: Archives of the Russian Revolution, edited by J. Guessen, Berlin, ed.
Slovo, 1922-1937.
BJWR-1: Kriga o rousskom cvrestve: ot 1860 godov do Revolioutsii 1917
g. [Book on the Jewish World of Russia: from the 1860s to the Revolution of
1917], New York, ed. Of the Union of Russian Jews, 1960.
BJWR-2: Kriza o rousskom evrestve, 1917-1967 [The Book on the Jewish
World of Russia, 1917-1967], New York, ed. Of the Union of Russian Jews,
1968.
JE: Jewish Encyclopdia in 16 volumes, St. Petersburg, Society for the
Promotion of Jewish Scientific Publishing and Ed. Brokhaus and Efron,
1906-1913.
JW: Evreskii mir [The Jewish World], Paris, Union of Russo-Jewish
intellectuals.
RaJ: Rossia i evrei [Russia and the Jews], Paris, YMCA Press, 1978 (original
ed., Berlin, 1924).
RHC: Istoriko-revolutsionnyi sbornik [Revolutionary Historical Collection],
edited by V. I. Nevski, 3 vols., M. L., GIZ, 1924-1926.
RJE: Rossiskaia Evreiskaya Entsiklopedia [Russian Jewish Encyclopedia],
M. 1994, 2nd edition currently being published, corrected and expanded.
Izvestia: News from the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies of
Petrograd.
SJE: Small Jewish Encyclopedia, Jerusalem, 1976, ed. Of the Society for the
Study of Jewish Communities.
TW: Vremia i my [The Time and We], international review of literature and
social problems, Tel Aviv.
 Volume 1

The Jews before the Revolution

 Chapter 1. Before the 19th century

From the Beginnings in Khazaria

In this book the presence of the Jews prior to 1772 will not be discussed in
detail. However, for a few pages, we will go over the older epochs.
One could say that the paths of Russians and Jews first crossed in the wars
between the Kiev Rus and the Khazars [Ancient people of the Turkish race
established in the region of the Low Volga since long. In the 6th century they
founded a vast empire stretching from the Oural to Dniepr, which fell in the
10th century after their defait by the prince of Kiev, Sviatoslav (966)], but that
isnt completely right, since only the upper class of the Khazars were of Hebraic
descent, the tribe itself consisted of Turcs who converted to Judaism.
If one follows the presentation of J.D. Bruzkus, respected Jewish author of
the mid-20th century, a certain part of the Jews from Persia moved across the
Derbent Pass to lower Volga where Atil on the west coast of Caspian on the
Volga delta, the capital city of the Khazarian Khanate 1, rose up starting 724 AD.
The tribal princes of the Turkish Khazars (at the time still idol-worshippers), did
not want to accept the Muslim faith, lest they should be subordinated to the
caliph of Baghdad, nor Christianity, lest they come under vassalage to the
Byzantine emperor; and so the clan went over to the Jewish faith in 732.
But there was also a Jewish colony in the Bosporan Kingdom 2 on the
Taman Peninsula at east end of the Crimea, separating the Black Sea from the
Sea of Azov, to which Hadrian had Jewish captives brought in 137, after the
victory over Bar-Kokhba [Founded in 480BC by the greek, conquered by
Mithridate in 107BC, remained under Roman protectorate until the 4th century].

1 J. D. Brutskus, Istoki rousskogo evrestva (Les origines des Juifs russes), in Annuaire du
monde juif, 1939. Paris, d. de l'Union des intellectuels russo-juifs, pp. 17-23.
2 EJ, t. 15, p. 648.
Later a Jewish settlement sustained itself without break under the Goths and
Huns in the Crimea. Kaffa (Feodosia) especially remained Jewish. In 933 Prince
Igor [Grand Prince of Kiev 912-945, successor of Oleg the wise] temporarily
possessed Kerch, and his son Sviatoslav [Grand Prince 960-972] wrested the
Don region from the Khazars.
The Kiev Rus already ruled the entire Volga region including Atil in 909,
and Russian ships appeared at Samander, south of Atil on the west coast of the
Caspian. The Kumyks [Turkish speaking people; independent state in the 15th
century, annexed to Russia in 1784] in the Caucasus were descendants of the
Khazars. In the Crimea, on the other hand, they combined with the Polovtsy
[Turkish speaking people from Asia that occupied the southern steppes of
Russia 11th century], a nomadic Turkish people from central Asia who had
lived in the northern Black Sea area and the Caucasus since the 10th century,
called Cuman by western historians. This admixture formed the Crimean Tatars.
But unlike the Tatars the Karaim [Turkish speaking people professing a belief
similar to Judaism, but without recognizing the Talmud (11th to 12th century)],
a Jewish sect that does not follow the Talmud, and Jewish residents of the
Crimea did not go over to the Muslim faith. The Khazars were finally overrun
much later by Tamerlane or Timur, the 14th century conqueror.
A few researchers, however hypothesize (exact proof is absent) that the
Hebrews had wandered to some extent through the south Russian region in a
westward and northwesterly direction. Thus the Orientalist and Semitist
Abraham Harkavy, for example writes that the Jewish congregation in the future
Russia emerge from Jews that came from the Black Sea coast and from the
Caucasus, where their ancestors had lived since the Assyrian and Babylonian
captivity.3 J. D. Bruzkus also leans to this perspective. Another opinion
suggests these were the remnant of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel [after the death
of Salomon, under the rule of Roboam, ten of the twelth tribes of Israel
separated from the House of David, formed the Kingdom of Israel and then
were punished and dispersed].
This migration presumably ended after the conquest in 1097 of
Timutarakans on the eastern shore of the Kerch straits, overlooking the eastern
end of the Crimean Peninsula; the eastern flank of the old Bosporan Kingdom,
by the Polovtsy. According to Harkavys opinion the vernacular of these Jews at
least since the ninth century was Slavic, and only in the 17th century, when the
Ukrainian Jews fled from the pogroms of the Ukrainian Cossack warlord
Bogdan Chmelnitzki [Hetman. Ukrainian leader (1593-1657), victoriously led
the Ukrainian Cossacks against Poland with the aid of the Crimean Tatars. In
1654 he received the protection of Moscow and became the vasal of tsar Alexis
Mikhalovitch], who led a successful Cossack rebellion against Poland with
help from the Crimean Tatars, did Yiddish become the language of Jews in
Poland.

3 PEI, I . 2, p. 40.
 In various manners the Jews also came to Kiev and settled there. Already
under Igor, the lower part of the city was called Kosary; in 933 Igor brought in
Jews that had been taken captive in Kerch. Then in 965 Jews taken captive in
the Crimea were brought there; in 969 Kosaren from Atil and Samander, in 989
from Cherson and in 1017 from Timutarakan. In Kiev western or Ashkenazi
Jews also emerged in connection with the caravan traffic from west to east, and
starting at the end of the eleventh century, perhaps on account of the persecution
in Europe during the first Crusade.4
Later researchers confirm likewise that in the 11th century, the Jewish
element in Kiev was derived from the Khazars. Still earlier, at the turn of the
10th century the presence of a Khazar force and a Khazar garrison was
chronicled in Kiev And already in the first half of the 11th century the
Jewish-Khazar element in Kiev played a significant role.5 In the 9th and 10th
century, Kiev was multinational and tolerant towards different ethnicities.
At the end of the 10th century, in the time when Prince Vladimir I.
Svyatoslavich [Saint Vladimir (956-1015), son of Sviatoslav, became sole
sovereign of the Kievian Russia of which hes considered the founder.
Converted to Byzantian Christianity which he established in the whole country
in 988AD] was choosing a new faith for the Russians, there were not a few
Jews in Kiev, and among them were found educated men who suggested taking
on the Jewish faith. The choice fell out otherwise than it had 250 hears earlier in
the Khazar Kingdom. The Russian historian Karamsin relates it like this: After
he (Vladimir) had listened to the Jews, he asked where their homeland was. In
Jerusalem, answered the delegates, but God has chastised us in his anger and
sent us into a foreign land. And you, whom God has punished, dare to teach
others? said Vladimir. We do not want to lose our fatherland like you have.6
After the Christianization of the Rus, according to Bruzkus, a portion of the
Khazar Jews in Kiev also went over to Christianity and afterwards in Novgorod
perhaps one of them, Luka Zhidyata,7 was even one of the first bishops and
spiritual writers. Christianity and Judaism being side-by-side in Kiev inevitably
led to the learned zealously contrasting them. From that emerged the work
significant to Russian literature, Sermon on Law and Grace by Hilarion, first
Russian Metropolitan in the middle 11th century, which contributed to the
settling of a Christian consciousness for the Russians that lasted for centuries.
The polemic here is as fresh and lively as in the letters of the apostles. 8 In any
case, it was the first century of Christianity in Russia. For the Russian

4 EJ, t. 9, p. 526.
5 V N. Toporov, Sviatost i sviatye v russko doukhovno koultoure (La saintet et les saints
russes dans la culture russe spirituelle), t. 1, M. 1995, pp. 283-286. 340.
6 N. M . Karamzine, Isloria gosoudarstva Rossiiskogo (Histoire de la nation russe), Saint-
Ptersbourg. 1842-1844, t. 1, p. 127. Cf. galement : S. M . Soloviev. Isloria Rossii s
drevneichikh vremen (Histoire de la Russie depuis les origines) en 15 volumes, M. 1962-
1966. t. 1. p. 181.
7 Brutskus, pp. 21-22 ; EJ, t. 7, p. 588.
8 Toporov, t. 1, p. 280.
neophytes of that time, the Jews were interesting, especially in connection to
their religious presentation, and even in Kiev there were opportunities for
contact with them. The interest was greater than later in the 18th century, when
they again were physically close.
Then, for more than a century, the Jews took part in the expanded
commerce of Kiev. In the new city wall completed in 1037 there was the Jews
Gate, which closed in the Jewish quarter.9 The Kiev Jews were not subjected to
any limitations, and the princes did not handle themselves with hostility, but
rather indeed vouchsafed to them protection, especially Sviatopluk Iziaslavich,
Prince of Novgorod (r. 1078-1087) and Grand Prince of Kiev from 1093 until
1113, since the trade and enterprising spirit of the Jews brought the princes
financial advantage.
In 1113 A.D., Vladimir Monomakh, out of qualms of conscience, even after
the death of Sviatopluk, hesitated to ascend the Kiev throne prior to one of the
Svyatoslaviches, and rioters, exploiting the anarchy, plundered the house of the
regimental commander Putiata and all Jews that had stood under the special
protection of the greedy Sviatopluk in the capital city. One reason for the Kiev
revolt was apparently the usury of the Jews. Exploiting the shortage of money
of the time, they enslaved the debtors with exorbitant interest. 10 (For example
there are indications in the statute of Vladimir Monomakh that Kiev money-
lenders received interest up to 50 percent per annum.) Karamsin therein appeals
to the Chronicles and an extrapolation by Basil Tatistcheff (1686-1750), student
of Peter the Great, and the first Russian historian. In Tatistcheff we find
moreover:
Afterwards they clubbed down many Jews and plundered their houses,
because they had brought about many sicknesses to Christians and commerce
with them had brought about great damage. Many of them, who had gathered in
their synagogue seeking protection, defended themselves as well as they could,
and gained time until Vladimir could arrive. But when he came, the Kievites
pleaded with him for retribution toward the Jews, because they had taken all the
trades from Christians and under Sviatopluk had had much freedom and power.
They had also brought many over to their faith.11
According to M. N. Pokrovski, the Kiev Pogrom of 1113 was of a social
and not national character. However the leaning of this class-conscious historian
toward social interpretations is well-known. After he ascended to the Kiev
throne, Vladimir answered the complainants, Since many Jews everywhere
have received access to the various princely courts and have migrated there, it is
not appropriate for me, without the advice of the princes, and moreover contrary
to right, to permit killing and plundering them. Hence I will without delay call
the princes to assemble, to give counsel.12 In the Council a law limiting interest

9 PEJ, t. 4, p. 253.
10 Karamzine, t. 2. pp. 87-88.
11 V. N. Tatischev, Histoire russe en 7 volumes, t. 2, M. 1963, p. 129.
12 Ibidem, p. 129.
was established, which Vladimir attached to Yaroslavs statute. Karamsin
reports, appealing to Tatistcheff, that Vladimir banned all Jews upon the
conclusion of the Council, and from that time forth there were none left in our
fatherland. But at the same time he qualifies: In the chronicles in contrast it
says that in 1124 the Jews in Kiev died in a great fire; consequently, they had
not been banned.13 Bruzkus explains, that it was a whole quarter in the best
part of the city... at the Jews Gate next to the Golden Gate.14
At least one Jew enjoyed the trust of Andrei Bogoliubsky in Vladimir.
Among the confidants of Andrei was a certain Ephraim Moisich, whose
patronymic Moisich or Moisievich indicates his Jewish derivation, and who
according to the words of the Chronicle was among the instigators of the
treason by which Andrei was murdered. 15 However there is also a notation that
says that under Andrei Bogoliubsky many Bulgarians and Jews from the Volga
territory came and had themselves baptized and that after the murder of Andrei
his son Georgi fled to a Jewish prince in Dagestan.16
In any case the information on the Jews in the time of the Suzdal Rus is
scanty, as their numbers were obviously small.
The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that in the Russian heroic songs (Bylinen)
the Jewish Czar e.g. the warrior Shidowin in the old Bylina about Ilya and
Dobrinia is a favorite general moniker for an enemy of the Christian faith.17
At the same time it could also be a trace of memories of the struggle against the
Khazars. Here, the religious basis of this hostility and exclusion is made clear.
On this basis, the Jews were not permitted to settle in the Muscovy Rus.
The invasion of the Tatars portended the end of the lively commerce of the
Kiev Rus, and many Jews apparently went to Poland. (Also the Jewish
colonization into Volhynia and Galicia continued, where they had scarcely
suffered from the Tatar invasion.) The Encyclopedia explains: During the
invasion of the Tatars (1239) which destroyed Kiev, the Jews also suffered, but
in the second half of the 13th century they were invited by the Grand Princes to
resettle in Kiev, which found itself under the domination of the Tatars. On
account of the special rights, which were also granted the Jews in other
possessions of the Tatars, envy was stirred up in the town residents against the
Kiev Jews.18
Something similar happened not only in Kiev, but also in the cities of North
Russia, which under the Tatar rule, were accessible for many merchants from
Khoresm or Khiva, who were long since experienced in trade and the tricks of
profit-seeking. These people bought from the Tatars the principalitys right to
levy tribute, they demanded excessive interest from poor people and, in case of
their failure to pay, declared the debtors to be their slaves, and took away their
13 Kuramzine, t. 2. Notes, p. 89.
14 Brutskus, p. 23.
15 Suloviev, livre I, p. 546.
16 Brutskus, p. 26.
17 EJ, t. 9, p. 5.
18 Ibidem, p. 517.
freedom. The residents of Vladimir, Suzdal, and Rostov finally lost their
patience and rose up together at the pealing of the bells against these usurers; a
few were killed and the rest chased off.19 A punitive expedition of the Khan
against the mutineers was threatened, which however was hindered via the
mediation of Alexander Nevsky. Lastly, in the documents of the 15th century,
Kievite Jewish tax-leasers are mentioned, who possessed a significant
fortune.20

The Judaizing Heresy

A migration of Jews from Poland to the East, including White Russia [Belarus],
should also be noted in the 15th century: there were leasers of tolls and other
assessments in Minsk, Polotsk, and in Smolensk, although no settled
congregations were formed there. After the short-lived banishment of Jews from
Lithuania (1496) the eastward movement went forth with particular energy at
the beginning of the 16th century.21
The number of Jews that migrated into the Muscovy Rus was insignificant
although influential Jews at that time had no difficulties going to Moscow. 22
Toward the end of the 15th century in the very center of the spiritual and
administrative power of the Rus, a change took place that, though barely
noticed, could have drawn an ominous unrest in its wake, and had far-reaching
consequences in the spiritual domain. It had to do with the Judaizing Heresy.
Saint Joseph of Volokolamsk (1439-1515) who resisted it, observed: Since the
time of Olga [Saint Olga (?-969), princess of Kiev, wife of prince Igor of whom
she became widow in 945; exercised rule until her son Sviatoslav became of
age. Converted in 954, she did however not succeed in spreading Christianity
throughout the whole country] and Vladimir, the God-fearing Russian world has
never experienced such a seduction.23
According to Kramsin it began thus: the Jew Zechariah, who in 1470 had
arrived in Novgorod from Kiev, figured out how to lead astray two spirituals,
Dionis and Aleksei; he assured them that only the Law of Moses was divine; the
history of the Redeemer was invented; the Messiah was not yet born; one

19 Karamzine, t. 4, pp. 54-55.

20 PEJ. t. 4, p. 254.
21 EJ, t. 5, p. 165.
22 Ibidem, 1.13. p. 610.
23 Karamzine, t. 6. p. 121.
should not pray to icons, etc. Thus began the Judaizing heresy.24 The renowned
Russian historian Sergey Solovyov (182079) expands on this, that Zechariah
accomplished it with the aid of five accomplices, who also were Jewish, and
that this heresy obviously was a mixture of Judaism and Christian rationalism
that denied the mystery of the holy Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. 25
The Orthodox Priest Aleksei called himself Abraham, his wife he called Sarah
and along with Dionis corrupted many spirituals and laymen. But it is hard to
understand how Zechariah was able so easily to increase the number of his
Novgorod pupils, since his wisdom consisted entirely and only in the rejection
of Christianity and the glorification of Judaism. Probably, Zechariah seduced
the Russians with the Jewish cabbala, a teaching that captured curious
ignoramuses and in the 15th century was well-known, when many educated
men sought in it the solution to all important riddles of the human spirit. The
cabbalists extolled themselves ..., they were able... to discern all secrets of
nature, explain dreams, prophecy the future, and conjure spirits.26
J. Gessen, a Jewish historian of the 20th century, presents in contrast the
opinion: It is certain that Jews participated neither in the introduction of the
heresy... nor its spread.27 (But with no indication of his sources). The
encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron [1890-1906, Czarist Russian equivalent
to the Encyclopedia Britannica] explains: Apparently the genuinely Jewish
element played no outstanding role, limiting its contribution to a few rituals. 28
The Jewish Encyclopedia, which appeared about the same time, writes on the
other hand: today, since the publication of the Psalter of the Judaizers and
other memorials, the contested question of the Jewish influence on the sects
must... be seen as settled in a positive sense.29
The Novgorod heretics presented an orderly exterior, appeared to fast
humbly and zealously fulfilled all the duties of piety. 30 They made themselves
noticed by the people and contributed to the rapid spreading of the heresy.31
When after the fall of Novgorod Ivan Vasilievich III (1440-1505) Grand Prince
of Moscovy, united the greater Russian territory under Moscows rule visited
the city, he was impressed by their piety and took both of the first heretics,
Aleksei and Dionis, to Moscow in 1480 and promoted them as high priests of
the Assumption of Mary and the Archangel cathedrals of the Kremlin. With
them also the schism was brought over, the roots of which remained in
Novgorod. Aleksei found special favor with the ruler and had free access to

24 Ibidem, p. 121.
25 Soloviev, livre III, p. 185.
26 Karamzine, t. 6, pp. 121-122.
27 J. Hessen, Istoria evreskogo naroda v Rossii (Histoire du peuple juif en Russie), en 2 vol.,
1.1, Leningrad, 1925, p. 8.
28 Dictionnaire encyclopdique en 82 volumes, Saint-Ptersbourg, 1890-1904, t. 22, 1904, p.
943.
29 EJ, t. 7, p. 577.
30 Karamzine, t. 6, p. 122.
31 Sotoviev, livre III, p. 185.
him, and with his secret teaching enticed not only several high spirituals and
officials, but moved the Grand Prince to appoint the archimandrite (head abbot
in Eastern Orthodoxy) Zossima as Metropolitan, that is, the head of the entire
Russian church a man from the very circle of the those he had enticed with the
heresy. In addition, he enticed Helena to the heresy daughter-in-law of the
Grand Prince, widow of Ivan the Younger and mother of the heir to the throne,
the blessed nephew Dimitri.32
The rapid success of this movement and the ease with which it spread is
astonishing. This is obviously to be explained through mutual interests. When
the Psalter of the Judaizing and other works which could mislead the
inexperienced Russian reader and were sometimes unambiguously anti-
Christian were translated from Hebrew into Russian, one could have assumed
that only Jews and Judaism would have been interested in them. But also the
Russian reader was interested in the translations of Jewish religious texts. This
explains the success which the propaganda of the Judaizing had in various
classes of society.33 The sharpness and liveliness of this contact is reminiscent of
that which had emerged in Kiev in the 11th century.
The Novgorod Archbishop Gennadi uncovered the heresy in 1487, sent
irrefutable proofs of it to Moscow, hunted the heresy out and unmasked it, until
in 1490 a church Council assembled to discuss the matter under leadership of
the just-promoted Metropolitan Sossima. With horror they heard the complaint
of Gennadi, ... that these apostates insult Christ and the mother of God, spit on
the cross, call the icons idolatrous images, bite on them with their teeth and
throw them into impure places, believe in neither the kingdom of Heaven nor
the resurrection of the dead, and entice the weak, while remaining quiet in the
presence of zealous Christians.34 From the judgment of the Council it is
apparent, that the Judaizers did not recognize Jesus Christ as the Son of God,
that they taught the Messiah had not yet appeared, that they observed the Old
Testament Sabbath day rather then the Christian Sunday.35 It was suggested to
the Council to execute the heretics but, in accordance with the will of Ivan III,
they were sentenced instead to imprisonment and the heresy was anathematized.
In view of the coarseness of the time and the seriousness of the moral
corruption, such a punishment was extraordinarily mild.36
The historians unanimously explain this hesitation of Ivan in that the heresy
had already spread widely under his own roof and was practiced by well-known,
influential people, among whom was Feodor Kuritsyn, Ivans plenipotentiary
Secretary, famous on account of his education and his capabilities 37. The
noteworthy liberalism of Moscow flowed from the temporary Dictator of the
Heart F. Kuritsyn. The magic of his secret salon was enjoyed even by the Grand
32 Karamzine, t. 6, pp. 120-123.
33 Toporov, t. 1, p. 357.
34 Karamzine, t. 6. p. 123.
35 EJ, t. 7, p. 580.
36 Karamzine, t. 6, p. 123.
37 Soloviev, livre III. p. 168.
Prince and his daughter-in-law. The heresy was by no means in abatement, but
rather prospered magnificently and spread itself out. At the Moscow court
astrology and magic along with the attractions of a pseudo-scientific revision of
the entire medieval worldview were solidly propagated, which was free-
thinking and carried by the appeal of enlightenment, and the power of
fashion.38
The Jewish Encyclopedia sets forth moreover that Ivan III out of political
motivations did not stand against the heresy. With Zechariahs help, he hoped to
strengthen his influence in Lithuania, and besides that he wanted to secure the
favor of influential Jews from the Crimea: of the princes and rulers of Taman
Peninsula, Zacharias de Ghisolfi, and of the Jew Chozi Kokos, a confidant of
the Khan Mengli Giray or Girai.39
After the Council of 1490 Sossima continued to sponsor a secret society for
several years, but then was himself discovered, and in 1494 the Grand Prince
commanded him to depose himself without process and to withdraw into a
cloister, without throwing up dust and to all appearances willingly. The heresy
however did not abate. For a time (1498) its votaries in Moscow seized almost
all the power, and their charge Dmitri, the son of the Princess Helena, was
coronated as Czar.40 Soon Ivan III reconciled himself with his wife Sophia
Paleologos, and in 1502 his son Vassili inherited the throne. (Kurizyn by this
time was dead.) Of the heretics, after the Council of 1504, one part was burned,
a second part thrown in prison, and a third fled to Lithuania, where they
formally adopted the Mosaic faith41.
It must be added that the overcoming of the Judaizing heresy gave the
spiritual life of the Muscovy Rus at turn of the 16th century a new impetus, and
contributed to recognizing the need for spiritual education, for schools for the
spiritual; and the name of Archbishop Gennadi is associated with the collecting
and publication of the first church-Slavic Bible, of which there had not to that
point been a consolidated text corpus in the Christian East. The printing press
was invented, and after 80 years this Gennadi Bible was printed in Ostrog
(1580-82); with its appearance, it took over the entire orthodox East 42. Even
academy member S. F. Platonov gives a generalizing judgment about the
phenomenon: The movement of Judaizing no doubt contained elements of the
West European rationalism... The heresy was condemned; its advocates had to
suffer, but the attitude of critique and skepticism produced by them over against
dogma and church order remained.43
Todays Jewish Encyclopedia remembers the thesis that an extremely
negative posture toward Judaism and the Jews was unknown in the Muskovy

38 A.V. Kariachev, Olchcrki po istorii Russko Tserkvi (Essais sur l'histoire de l'glise russe)
en 2 vol., Paris. 1959, t. 1, pp. 495, 497.
39 EJ. t. 13, p. 610.
40 Ibidem, t. 7, p. 579.
41 PEJ, t. 2, p. 509.
42 Kartachev, t. 1, p. 505.
43 S. F. Platonov, Moskva i Zapad (Moscou et l'Occident), Berlin, 1926, pp. 37-38.
Rus up to the beginning of the 16th century, and derives it from this struggle
against the Judaizers44. Judging by the spiritual and civil measures of the
circumstances, that is thoroughly probable. J. Gessen however contends: it is
significant, that such a specific coloring of the heresy as Judaizing did not
lessen the success of the sects and in no way led to the development of a hostile
stance toward the Jews.45
Judging by its stable manner of life, it was in neighboring Poland that the
biggest Jewish community emerged, expanded and became strong from the 13th
to the 18th century. It formed the basis of the future Russian Jewry, which
became the most important part of world Jewry until the 20th century. Starting
in the 16th century a significant number of Polish and Czech Jews emigrated
into the Ukraine, White Russia and Lithuania 46. In the 15th century Jewish
merchants traveled still unhindered from the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom to
Moscow. But that changed under Ivan IV the Terrible: Jewish merchants were
forbidden entry.
When in 1550 the Polish King Sigismund August desired to permit them
free entry into Russia, this was denied by Ivan with these words: We absolutely
do not permit the entry of the Jew into my lands, because we do not wish to see
evil in our lands, but rather may God grant that the people in my land may have
rest from that irritation. And you, our brother, should not write us on account of
the Jews again,47 for they had alienated the Russians from Christianity,
brought poisonous plants into our lands and done much evil to our lands.48
According to a legend Ivan the Terrible, upon the annexation of Polotsk in
1563, ordered all Jews to be baptized in response to complaints of Russian
residents against evil things and bullying by Jews, leasers and others
empowered by Polish magnates. Those that refused, apparently about 300
persons, are supposed to have been drowned in his presence in the Dvina. But
careful historians, as e.g. J. I. Gessen, do not confirm this version even in
moderated form and do not mention it once.
Instead of that, Gessen writes that under the False Dimitri I (1605-06) both
Jews and other foreigners in relatively large number were baptized in
Moscow. The story goes according to In the Time of Troubles by Sergey Ivanov,
regarding the 15-year period of confusion following the failed Rurik Dynasty in
1598-1613 that the False Dimitri II, aka the Thief of Tushino, was born a
Jew.49 The sources give contradictory information regarding the ancestry of the
Thief of Tushino. Some assert that he was born Matthieu Vercvkinc, the son of
an Ukrainian priest; or a Jew, as is said in the official documents; if one
believes a foreign historian, he knew Hebrew, read the Talmud, the books of the

44 PEJ, t. 2, p. 509.
45 Hessen, t. 1, p. 8.
46 Brutskus ; CM, t. 1, p 28.
47 El, t. 8, p. 749.
48 Hessen, t. 1. pp. 8-9.
49 Ibidem, p. 9.
rabbis Sigismond sent a Jew who passed himself for the Tsarevitch
Dimitri.50 The Jewish Encyclopedia says: Jews made up part of the imposters
following and suffered after his fall. According to some sources the False
Dimitri II was a baptised Jew who had served under False Dimitri I.51
Polish-Lithuanians, who had arrived in numerously in Russia during the
Time of Troubles, were, at the start of this period, limited in their rights and
the Jews who came from those countries partook in the fate of their
compatriots for whom it had been forbidden to take their merchandise to
Moscow and the neighbouring cities.52 The Moscow-Polish agreement on the
accession to the throne of Vladislav [Polish king (1595-1648)] stipulated: one
must not be forced to embrace the Roman belief, nor other confessions, and the
Jews should not be allowed to enter the state of Moscow to trade. 53 But others
sources point out that the Jewish merchants had access to Moscow, even after
the Time of Troubles.54 The contradictory decrees show that the government of
Michel Feodorovitch [First Czar of the Romanov dynasty (1596-1645), elected
by the Assembly of the people in 1613] was not pursuing any specific policy
concerning the Jews but he was rather tolerant towards them.55
Under the rule of Alexis Mikhalovitch [Son of the previous, Czar of
Russia from 1645 to 1676], signs can be found of Jewish presence in Russia
the Code does no contain any restriction when it comes to the Jews they had
then acces to all Russian cities, including Moscow.56 Hessen asserts that the
population taken during the Russian offensive in Lithuania in the 30s of the
17th century contained a fair number of Jews, and their arrangements were the
same as that of the others. Following the military actions of the 1650-1660s,
the Jewish prisoners found themselves in the state of Moscow again, and their
treatment was not worse than that of the other prisoners.
After the signing of the treaty of Androussiv in 1667 in which Smolensk,
Kiev and the whole eastern bank of the Dniper River remained Russian, it was
proposed that the Jews should stay in the country. Many of them profited from
the situation, some embraced Christianity and amongst the prisoners were some
of the founders of the later Russian nobility.57 (Certain baptised Jews settled in
the the 17th century along the Don, in the Cossack village of Starotcherkassk,
and about a dozen Cossack families are descended from them.) Around the
same year of 1667, the Englishman Samuel Collins, residing in Moscow at the
time, wrote that in a short time, the Jews have spread remarkably through the

50 Karamzine, t. 12, p. 35-36 ; notes, p. 33.

51 PEJ. t. 7, p. 290.
52 Hessen, t. I, p. 9.
53 Karamzine, t. 12, p. 141.
54 /. M . Dijour. Evrci v ckonomitchesko jizni Rossii (Les Juifs dans la vie conomique de la
Russie), in LMJR, p. 156.
55 EJ, t. 13, p. 611.
56 Ibidem.
57 J. Guessen, t. 1, pp. 9-10.
city and in the court, apparently under the protection of a Jewish surgeon of the
court.58
Under Czar Feodor III, a decree was tried that if Jews clandestinely arrive
in Moscow with merchandise, they are not to be assessed toll, because with or
without wares, they are forbidden entry to Smolensk.59 But the practice did
not correspond to the theory.60
In the first year of Peter the Great (1702), doors were opened to talented
foreigners, but not Jews: I would rather see Mohammedans and pagans than
Jews come here. They are rogues and deceivers. I root out evil, I do not spread
it; there is no place, nor work for them in Russia, in spite of all of their efforts to
bribe my entourage.61
Yet there is no evidence of limitations imposed on them under Peter the
Great, nor special laws. To the contrary, due to the general benevolence given to
all foreigners, they became involved in a wide range of activities, and even
positions close to the Emperor:

Vice-chancellor Baron Peter Shafirov, he was later found guilty of

embezzlement and disordedly conduct, for which received capital
punishment, later commuted to banishment. After the death of Peter his
punishments were lifted and he was commissioned write down the life of his
late master.62
His cousins Abram Veselovsky, and
Isaac Veselovsky, close confidants of Peter
Anton de Vieira, general police master of Petersburg
Vivire, head of secret police
Acosta, the jester

and others. To A. Veselovsky, Peter wrote that what matters is competence and
honesty, not baptism or circumcision.63 Jewish mercantile houses in Germany
inquired whether Russia would guarantee their commerce with Persia, but never
received an answer.64
At start of the 18th century there was increased Jewish trade activity in
Little Russia and Ukraine, a year before Russian merchants got the right to
engage in such commerce. The Ukrainian Hetman Skoropadski gave order
several times for their expulsion, but this was not obeyed and Jewish presence

58 EJ, 1.11, p. 330.

59 Ibidem.
60 EJ, 1.13, p. 612.
61 Soloviev, livre VJH, p. 76.
62 Ibidem, livre X, p. 477.
63 El, t. 5, p. 519.
64 EJ, 1.11, p. 330.
actually increased.65 In 1727, Catherine I, giving in to Menchikov shortly before
her death, decreed the removal of Jews from Ukraine and Russian cities (in this
case, the large share taken by the Jews in the productionn and trading of
brandy may have played a part), but this only lasted one year.66
In 1728, Peter II permitted Jews into Little Russia, first as temporary
visitors on the ground of their usefulness for trade, then more and more
reasons were found to make it permanent. Under Anna this right was extended
to Smolensk in 1731 and Slobodsky in 1734. Permission was given to Jews to
lease land and to distil brandy, and, after 1736, to supply Polish vodka to any
public drinking places, including those in Greater Russia.67
It is important to mention Baltic financier Levy Lipman. While czarina
Anna Iwanowna was still living in Courland she was in dire need of money
and it is probable that Lipman was on occasions of use to her. Under Peter I,
he had already settled in St Petersburg. Under Peter II, he became a financial
agent or Juweler at the Russian court. After Anna Iwanowna ascended to the
throne, he accrued important relations at the court, and achieved the rank of
High Commissar. Due to his direct contact with the czarina, he also had close
ties to her favourite, Biron His contemporaries assert that Biron came to
him for council on the vital problems of the Russian state. One of the
ambassadors at the court wrote: One could say that it is Lipman who is truly
ruling Russia. Through time these accusations became milder. 68 Nevertheless,
Biron had transferred nearly all of the financial administration and several
commercial monopolies.69 (Lipman retained his functions at the court, even
after Anna Leopoldowna had exiled Biron.70)
Anna Iwanownas had also been influenced by Lipman in her general
attitude towards the Jews. Even if, around the time of her ascension to the
throne in 1730, she expressed in a letter to her ambassador to the Ukrainian
Hetman, her concerns that only a tiny part of the Small Russians engage in
commerce, and that it is mainly the Greek, the Turks and the Jews who are
involved in trading,71 (from which we can conclude that the alleged expulsion
from 1727 never occurred, and that the aforementioned decrees had never gone
beyond letters on a page). In 1739, Jews were banned from leasing land in
Small Russia; and in 1740 about 600 Jews were expelled from the country. 72 (In
opposition to which stood also the interests of the landlords.)
One year after her ascension to the throne, Elisabeth III signed a Ukase [an
imperial Russian decree] (December 1742): It is forbidden for a Jew to live
anywhere within our empire; now it has been made known to us, that these Jews

65 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 11-12.

66 Ibidem, p. 13 ; EJ, t. 2, p. 592.
67 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 13-15 ; EJ, t. 2, p. 592.
68 EJ, t. 10, pp. 224-225.
69 Ibidem, t. 4, p. 591.
70 Ibidem, t. 10, p. 225.
71 Soloviev, livre X. pp. 256-257.
72 Hessen, t. 1. p. 15.
still find themselves in our realm and, under various pretexts, especially in
Little Russia. They prolong their stay, which is in no way beneficial; but as we
must expect only great injuries to our loyal subjects from such haters of the
name of our Savior Jesus Christ, we order all Jews, male and female, along with
their entire possession, to be sent without delay from our realm, over the border,
and in the future not allowed back in, unless it should be that one of them
should confess our Christian religion.73
This was the same religious intolerance that shook Europe for centuries.
The way of thinking of that time was not unique in any special Russian way, nor
was it an exclusively Jew-hostile attitude. Among Christians the religious
intolerance was not practiced with any less cruelty. Thus, the Old Believers, i.e.
men of the same orthodox faith, were persecuted with fire and sword.
This ukase of Elisabeth was made known throughout the realm, but
immediately attempts were made to move the ruler to relent. The military
chancellor reported to the Senate from the Ukraine that already 140 people were
evicted, but that the prohibition against Jews to bring goods in would lead to a
reduction in state income.74 The Senate reported to the Czarina that trade had
suffered great damage in Little Russia as well as the Baltic provinces by the
ukase of the previous year to not allow Jews into the realm, and also the state
purse would suffer by the reduction of income from tolls. The Czarina
answered with the resolution: I desire no profit from the enemies of Christ.75
Gessen concluded that Russia remained, under Elisabeth, without Jews. 76
The Jewish historian S. Doubnov proposes that under Elisabeth according to
contemporary historians, towards 1753 35,000 Jews had been chased from
the country.77 But this figure is in stark contrast to the arrangement made three
years earlier by Anna Iwanow and which had not been followed, namely to
expel 600 Jews from the whole of Ukraine, too far as well from the 142
expelled Jews mentioned in the report from the Senate to Elisabeth. 78 V.I.
Telnikov suggests79 that the contemporary historian, from whom these
numbers stem, never existed. That this contemporary historian of whom
Doubnov cites neither the name, nor the title of the work, is no other than E.
Herrmann, who published this number, not at that time, but exactly one century
later, in 1853, and also with no reference as to the source but with a strange
extension80, namely that the Jews were commanded to leave the land under
penalty of death, which shows that this historian was ignorant of the fact that
73 Soloviev, livre XI, pp. 155-156.
74 Hessen, 1. 1, p. 16.
75 Soloviev, livre XI, p. 204.
76 Hessen, t. I , p. 18.
77 S. M Doubnov, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, from the earliest times until the
prsent day, Philadelphie, the Jewish Publication Society of America, 1916, vol. 1, p. 258.
Trad. franaise diffuse par les d. du Cerf, Paris, 1992. 78. EJ, t. 7, p. 513.
78 EJ, t. 7, p. 513.
79 Dans son livre inachev et rest indit sur la politique du rgime tsariste l'gard des Juifs,
Telnikov fait tat de nombreuses et importantes sources que nous avons utilises avec
reconnaissance dans la premire partie de cet ouvrage.
Elisabeth had been the one who abolished capital punishment in Russia (for
religious reasons) at the time of her ascension to the throne. Telnikov remarks
that one of the great Jewish historians, Heinrich Graertz, does not speak a word
on the execution of these decrees by Elizabeth. For comparison, lets state here
that according to G. Sliosberg attempts were made to chase the Jews from
Ukraine.81
It is more likely that, having encountered strong resistance, not just from
the Jews, but also the landowners and the state apparatus, the decree of
Elisabeth was not put into practice, much like the numerous preceding similars.
Under Elisabeth, Jews occupied important positions. The diplomat Isaak
Wesselowskij was entrusted with governance responsibilities and overwhelmed
with favours from the empress; he also pressed chancellor A. Bestushew-
Ryumin to block the expulsion of the Jews. (Later he gave Russian language
classes to the heir, later Peter III. And his brother Feodor was curator of
Moscow University.82) Of note also is the rise of the Saxon merchant Grunstein,
a Lutheran, who converted to the Orthodox faith, after an unsuccessful trade
with Persia ended with him being taken captive. He enlisted in the
Preobrashensker Regiment, was among the active participants in the coup which
brought Elizabeth to the throne, received the rank of adjutant as a reward, was
inducted into the hereditary and was presented 927 serfs, no more and no less.
(How generously they handed out these serfs, our Orthodox czars!) But after
that, the success of his career clouded his mind. Sometimes he threatened to
murder the Prosecutor General. One time, on the nocturnal streets, without
knowing who it was, he beat up a relative of the Empress favoured Alexej
Rasumowskij. The Brawl on the Road did not go unpunished, and he was
exiled to Ustyug.83
Peter III, who ruled for no more than six months, had barely had time to
take a position on the Jewish Problem. (Although he probably carried with him
a scar, due to a certain Jew Mussafi who, during Peters youth in Holstein,
had been an intermediary for the lending of money, which had ruined the
treasury of Holstein; Mussafi went into hiding as soon as it was announced that
the Grand Prince had come of age.84)
[The footnotes for the rest of this chapter are missing]
But the latter figure having questionable origins; strong resistance to the
edict by Jews, land proprietors and the state apparati meant it was enforced
almost as little as previous attempts had been. Catherine II, who became
Czarina 1762 in consequence of a coup, also being a neophyte to Eastern

80 E. Herrmann, Geschichte des russischen Staats. Fiinfter band : Von der Thronbes-teigung
der Kaiserin Elisabeth bis zur Feier des Friedens von kainardsche (1742-1775), Hambourg,
1853, p. 171.
81 G. B. Sliosberg, Dorevolioutsionnyi stro Rossii (Le rgime prrvolutionnaire de Russie),
Paris, 1933, p. 264.
82 EJ, t. 5. pp. 519-520.
83 Soloviev, livre XI, pp. 134, 319-322.
84 Ibidem, p. 383.
Orthodoxy herself, was unwilling to start her reign opening things up for Jews,
though the Senate advised it. Jews pressed for it and had spokesmen in
Petersburg, Riga, and Ukraine. She found a way around her own law in
permitting their entry for colonization into New Russia, the area between
Crimea and Moldavia, which was still a wasteland. This was organized secretly
from Riga, and the nationality of the Jews was kept more or less secret. Jews
went there from Poland and Lithuania. In the first Partition of Poland, 1772,
Russia reacquired White Russia (Belarus) along with her 100,000 Jews.
After the 11th century more and more Jews came into Poland because
princes and later kings encouraged all active, industrious people from western
Europe to settle there. Jews actually received special rights, e.g. in the 13th
century from Boleslav the Pious; in the 14th century, from Kasimir the Great; in
the 16th century from Sigismund I and Stephan Bathory; though this sometimes
alternated with repression, e.g. in the 15th century by Vladislav Yagiello and
Alexander, son of Kasimir. Tthere were two pogroms in Krakow. In the 16th
century several ghettos were constructed partly to protect the Jews. The Roman
Catholic spirituals were the most continuous source of hostility to the Jewish
presence. Nevertheless, on balance it must have been a favorable environment,
since in first half of the 16th century the Jewish population increased
substantially. There was a big role for Jews in the business activity of landlords,
in that they became leasers of brandy-distilling operations.
After the Tatar devastation, Kiev in the 14th century came under Lithuania
and/or Poland, and with this arrangement more and more Jews wandered from
Podolia and Volhynia into the Ukraine, in the regions of Kiev, Poltava, and
Chernigov. This process accelerated when a large part of Ukraine came directly
under Poland in the Union of Lublin, 1569. The main population consisted of
Orthodox peasants, who for a long time had had special rights and were free of
tolls. Now began an intensive colonization of the Ukraine by the Szlachta
(Polish nobility) with conjoint action by the Jews. The Cossacks were forced
into immobility, and obligated to perform drudgery and pay taxes. The Catholic
lords burdened the Orthodox peasants with various taxes and service duties, and
in this exploitation the Jews also partly played a sad role. They leased from the
lords the propination, i.e. the right to distil vodka and sell it, as well as other
trades. The Jewish leaser, who represented the Polish lord, received of course
only to a certain degree the power that the landholder had over the peasants;
and since the Jewish leasers strove to wring from the peasants a maximum
profit, the rage of the peasants rose not only against the Catholic landlords but
also against the Jewish leasers. When from this situation a bloody uprising of
the Cossacks arose in 1648 under leadership of Chmelnitsky, Jews as well as
Poles were the victims. An estimated 10,000 Jews died.
The Jews were lured in by the natural riches of the Ukraine and by Polish
magnates that were colonizing the land, and thus assumed an important
economic role. Since they served the interests of the landlords and the rgime
the Jews brought on themselves the hatred of the residents. N. I. Kostomarov
adds that the Jews leased not only various branches of the privileged industries
but even the Orthodox churches, gaining the right to levy a fee for baptisms.
After the uprising, the Jews, on the basis of the Treaty of Belaia Tserkov
(1651) were again given the right to resettle in the Ukraine. As before, the Jews
were residents and leasers of the royal industries and the industries of the
Szlachta, and so it was to remain. Going into the 18th century, brandy distilling
was practically the main profession of Jews. This trade often led to conflicts
with the peasants, who sometimes were drawn into the taverns not so much
because they were well-to-do, but on account of their poverty and misery.
Included among the restrictions placed on the Polish Jews in response to
demands of the Catholic Church was the prohibition against Jews having
Christian house-servants. Because of the recruitment coupled with the state tax
increases in neighboring Russia, not a few refugees came to Poland, where they
had no rights. In the debates of Catherines commission for reworking a new
Law code (1767/68), one could hear that in Poland already a number of
Russian refugees are servants to Jews.

The Kahal And Civil Rights

The Jews of Poland maintained a vigorous economic relation to the surrounding

population, yet in the five centuries that they lived there, did not permit any
influence from outside themselves. One century after another rolled by in post-
medieval European development, while the Polish Jews remained confined to
themselves and became increasingly anachronistic in appearance. They had a
fixed order within themselves. Here it is granted, that these conditions, which
later remained intact also in Russia until the middle of the 19th century, were
favorable for the religious and national preservation of the Jews from the very
beginning of their Diaspora. The whole of Jewish life was guided by the Kahal,
which had developed from the communal life of the Jews. The Kahal, pl.
Kehilot was the autonomous organization of the leadership of the Jewish
congregations in Poland.
The Kahal was a buffer between Polish authorities and the Jewish people; it
collected taxes, for example. It took care of the needy and also regulated Jewish
commerce, approved resales, purchases, and leases. It adjudicated disputes
between Jews, which could not be appealed to the secular legal system without
incurring the ban (herem). What may have started as a democratic institution
took on the qualities of an oligarchy bent on maintaining its own power. In turn,
the rabbis and Kahal had a mutually exploitative relationship, in that the rabbis
were the executive enforcement arm of the Kahal, and owed their position to
appointment by the Kahal. Likewise, the Kahal owed the maintenance of its
power more to the secular rgime than to its own people.
Toward end of 17th century and through 18th century, the country was torn
by strife; the magnates arbitrariness increased further. Jews became poor and
demoralized, and hardened in early medieval forms of life. They became child-
like, or better childish oldsters. 16th century Jewish spiritual rulers were
concentrated in German and Polish Jewry. They put barriers up against contact
with outsiders. The rabbinate held the Jews in firm bondage to the past.
The fact that the Jewish people have held themselves together in their
diaspora for 2,000 years inspires wonder and admiration. But when one
examines certain periods more closely, as e.g. the Polish/Russian one in the 16th
and into the middle of the 17th century, and how this unity was only won by
means of methods of suppression exercised by the Kehilot, then one no longer
knows if it can be evaluated merely as an aspect of religious tradition. If the
slightest trace of such isolationism were detected amongst us Russians, we
would be severely faulted.
When Jewry came under the rule of the Russian state, this indigenous
system remained, in which the hierarchy of the Kahal had a self-interest.
According to J. I. Gessen, all the anger that enlightened Jews felt against the
ossifying Talmudic tradition became stronger in the middle of the 19th century:
The representatives of the ruling class of Jewry staked everything on
persuading the [Russian] administration of the necessity to maintain this
centuries-old institution, which reflected the interests both of the Russian power
and of the ruling Jewish class; the Kahal in connection with the rabbis held all
the power and not seldom abused it: it misappropriated public funds, trampled
the rights of the poor, arbitrarily increased taxes and wreaked vengeance on
personal enemies. At the end of the 18th century the gvernor of one the
administrative regions attached to Russia wrote in his report: The rabbis, the
spiritual Council and the Kahal, which are knitted closely together, hold all
things in their hand and lord it over the conscience of the Jews, and in complete
isolation rule over them, without any relation to the civil order.
In 18th century Eastern European Jewry two movements developed: the
religious one of the Hassidim [or Hasidim, or Chasidim] and the enlightening
one favoring secular culture, spearheaded by Moses Mendelsohn; but the
Kehiloth suppressed both with all its might. In 1781 the Rabbinate of
[Lithuanian] Vilna placed the ban over the Hasidim and in 1784 the Assembly
of Rabbis in [White Russian] Mogilev declared them as outlaws and their
property as without owner. hereafter mobs laid waste to the houses of Hasidim
in several cities, .e. it was an intra-Jewish pogrom. The Hasidim were
persecuted in the most cruel and unfair manner; their rivals did not even feel
embarrassed to denounce them before the Russian authorities with false
political charges. In turn, in 1799 the officials arrested members of the Kehilot
of Vilna for embezzlement of tax money, based on the complaints of Hasidics.
The Hasidim movement expanded, being especially successful in certain
provinces. The rabbis had Hasidic books publicly burned and the Hasidim
emerged as defenders of the people against abuses of the Kehilot. It is apparent
that in those times the religious war between Jews overshadowed other
questions of religious life.
The part of White Russia that fell to Russia in 1772 consisted of the
Provinces of Polotsk (later Vitebsk) and Mogilev. In a communiqu to those
governments in the name of Catherine it was explained that their residents of
whichever sex and standing they might be would from now on have the right
to public exercise of faith and to own property in addition to all rights,
freedoms and privileges which their subjects previously enjoyed. The Jews
were thus legally set as equals to Christians, which had not been the case in
Poland. As to the Jews, it was added that their businesses stay and remain
intact with all those rights that they today...enjoy i.e. nothing would be taken
away from Polish rights either. Through this, the previous power of the Kehilot
survived: the Jews with their Kahal system remained isolated from the rest of
the population and were not immediately taken into the class of traders and
businessmen that corresponded to their predominant occupations.
In the beginning, Catherine was on her guard not only against any hostile
reaction of the Polish nobility, from whom power threatened to slip away, but
also against giving an unfavorable impression to her Orthodox subjects. But she
did extend wider rights to the Jews, whom she wished well and promised
herself of their economic utility to the nation. Already in 1778 the most recent
general Russian regulation was extended to White Russia: those holding up to
500 rubles belonged to the class of trade-plying townsmen; those with more
capital, to the class of merchant, endowed into one of three guilds according to
possession: both classes were free of the poll tax and paid 1% of their capital
which was declared according to conscience.
This regulation was of particularly great significance: it set aside the
national isolation of Jews up to that time Catherine wanted to end that.
Further, she subverted the traditional Polish perspective on Jews as an element
standing outside the state. Moreover, she weakened the Kahal system, the
capability of the Kahal to compel. The process began of pressing Jews into the
civil organism. The Jews availed themselves to a great extent of the right to be
registered as merchants so that e.g. 10% of the Jewish population in the
Mogilev Province declared themselves as merchants (but only 5.5% of the
Christians.) The Jewish merchants were now freed from the tax obligation to
the Kahal and did not have to apply to the Kahal any more for permission to be
temporarily absent they had only to deal with the cognizant magistrate. In
1780 the Jews in Mogilev and Shklov greeted Catherine upon her arrival with
odes.
With this advance of Jewish merchants the civil category Jew ceased to
exist. All other Jews had now likewise to be assigned to a status, and obviously
the only one left for them was townsmen. But at first, few wanted to be
reclassified as such, since the annual poll tax for townsmen at that time was 60
kopecks but only 50 kopecks for Jews. However, there was no other option.
From 1783, neither the Jewish townsmen nor merchants needed to pay their
taxes to the Kahal, but instead, to the magistrate, each according to his class,
and from him they also received their travel passes.
The new order had consequences for the cities, which only took status into
consideration, not nationality. According to this arrangement, all townsmen and
thus also all Jews had the right to participate in the local class governance and
occupy official posts. Corresponding to the conditions of that time this meant
that the Jews became citizens with equal rights.
The entry of Jews as citizens with equal right into the merchant guilds and
townsmen class was an event of great social significance. It was supposed to
transform the Jews into an economic power that would have to be reckoned
with, and raise their morale. It also made the practical protection of their life-
interests easier. At that time the classes of traders and tradesmen just like the
municipal commonwealth had a broad self-determination. Thus, a certain
administrative and judicial power was placed into the hands of Jews just like
Christians, through which the Jewish population held a commercial and civil
influence and significance. Jews could now not only become mayors but also
advisory delegates and judges.
At first limitations were enacted in the larger cities to ensure that no more
Jews occupied electable positions than Christians. In 1786 however Catherine
sent to the Governor General of White Russia a command written by her own
hand: to actualize the equality of Jews in the municipal-class self-governance
unconditionally and without any hesitation and to impose an appropriate
penalty upon anyone that should hinder this equality. It should be pointed out
that the Jews thus were given equal rights not only in contrast to Poland, but
also earlier than in France or the German states. (Under Frederick the Great the
Jews suffered great limitations.) Indeed: the Jews in Russia had from the
beginning the personal freedom that the Russian peasants were only granted 80
years later. Paradoxically, the Jews gained greater freedom than even the
Russian merchants and tradesmen. The latter had to live exclusively in the
cities, while in contrast the Jewish population could live in colonies in the
country and distill liquor.
Although the Jews dwelled in clusters not only in the city but also in the
villages, they were accounted as part of the city contingent inclusive of
merchant and townsmen classes. According to the manner of their activity and
surrounded by unfree peasantry they played an important economic roll. Rural
trade was concentrated in their hands, and they leased various posts belonging
to the landowners privilege specifically, the sale of vodka in taverns and
therewith fostered the expansion of drunkenness. The White-Russian powers
reported: The presence of Jews in the villages acts with harm upon the
economic and moral condition of the rural population, because the Jews
encourage drunkenness among the local population. In the stance taken by the
powers-that-be, it was indicated among other things that the Jews led the
peasants astray with drunkenness, idleness and poverty, that they had given
them vodka on credit, received pledges in pawn for vodka, etc. But the brandy
operations were an attractive source of income for both the Polish landowners
and the Jewish commissioners.
Granted, the gift of citizenship that the Jews received brought a danger with
it: obviously the Jews were also supposed to acquiesce to the general rule to
cease the brandy business in the villages and move out. In 1783 the following
decree was published: The general rule requires every citizen to apply himself
in a respectable trade and business, but not the distilling of schnapps as that is
not a fitting business, and whenever the proprietor permits the merchant,
townsman or Jew to distill vodka, he will be held as a law-breaker. And thus it
happened: they began to transfer the Jews from the villages to the cities to
deflect them from their centuries-old occupation, the leasing of distilleries and
taverns.
To the Jews the threat of a complete removal from the villages naturally
appeared not as a uniform civil measure, but rather as one that was set up
specially to oppose their national religion. The Jewish townsmen that were
supposed to be resettled into the city and unambiguously were to be robbed of a
very lucrative business in the country, fell into an inner-city and inner-Jewish
competition. Indignation grew among the Jews, and in 1784 a commission of
the Kehilot traveled to St Petersburg to seek the cancellation of these measures.
(At the same time the Kehilot reasoned that they should, with the help of the
administration, regain their lost power in its full extent over the Jewish
population.) But the answer of the Czarina read: As soon as the people yoked
to the Jewish law have arrived at the condition of equality, the Order must be
upheld in every case, so that each according to his rank and status enjoys the
benefits and rights, without distinction of belief or national origin.
But the clenched power of the Polish proprietors also had to be reckoned
with. Although the administration of White Russia forbad them in 1783 to lease
the schnapps distilling to unauthorized person, especially Jews, the landlords
continued to lease this industry to Jews. That was their right, an inheritance of
centuries-old Polish custom. The Senate did not venture to apply force against
the landholders and in 1786 removed their jurisdiction to relocate Jews into
cities. For this a compromise was found: The Jews would be regarded as people
that had relocated to the cities, but would retain the right to temporary visits to
the villages. That meant that those that were living in the villages continued to
live there. The Senate permission of 1786 permitted the Jews to live in villages
and Jews were allowed to lease from the landholders the right to produce and
sell alcoholic beverages, while Christian merchants and townsmen did not
obtain these rights.
Even the efforts of the delegation of Kehilot in St Petersburg was not
wholly without success. They did not get what they came for the
establishment of a separate Jewish court for all contentions between Jews but
in 1786 a significant part of their supervisory right was given back: the
supervision of Jewish townsmen i.e. the majority of the Jewish population. This
included not only the division of public benefits but also the levying of poll tax
and adjudicating the right to separate from the congregation. Thus, the
administration recognized its interest in not weakening the power of the Kahal.
In all Russia, the status of traders and businessmen (merchants and
townsmen) did not have the right to choose their residences. Their members
were bound to that locality in which they were registered, in order that the
financial position of their localities would not be weakened. However, the
Senate made an exception in 1782 for White Russia: the merchants could move
as the case might be, as it was propitious for commerce from one city to
another. The ruling favored especially the Jewish merchants.
However, they began to exploit this right in a greater extent than had been
foreseen: Jewish merchants began to be registered in Moscow and Smolensk.
Jews began soon after the annexation of White Russia in 1782 to settle in
Moscow. By the end of the 18th century the number of Jews in Moscow was
considerable. Some Jews that had entered the ranks of the Moscow merchant
class began to practice wholesaling. Other Jews in contrast sold foreign goods
from their apartments or in the courts, or began peddling, though this was at the
time forbidden. In 1790 the Moscow merchants submitted a complaint to the
government: In Moscow has emerged a not insignificant number of Jews from
foreign countries and from White Russia who as opportunity afforded joined the
Moscow merchant guilds and then utilized forbidden methods of business,
which brought about very hurtful damage, and the cheapness of their goods
indicates that it involves smuggling, but moreover as is well-known they cut
coins: it is possible, that they will also do this in Moscow. As a response to
their thoroughly cagey findings, the Moscow merchants demanded their
removal from Moscow. The Jewish merchants appealed with a counter-
complaint that they were not accepted into the Smolensk and Moscow merchant
guilds.
The Council of Her Majesty heard the complaints. In accordance with the
Unified Russian Order, she firmly established that the Jews did not have the
right to be registered in the Russian trading towns and harbors, but only in
White Russia. By no means is usefulness to be expected from the migration
of Jews into Moscow. In December 1791 she promulgated a highest-order
ukase, which prohibited Jews from joining the merchant guilds of the inner
provinces, but permitted them for a limited time for trade reasons to enter
Moscow. Jews were allowed to utilize the rights of the merchant guild and
townsman class only in White Russia. The right to permanent residency and
membership in the townsman class, Catherine continued, was granted in New
Russia, now accessible in the viceregencies of Yekaterinoslav (Glory of
Catherine the Great, later changed to Dnepropetrovsk) and Taurida; that is,
Catherine allowed Jews to migrate into the new, expansive territories, into
which Christian merchants and townsmen from the provinces of interior Russia
generally were not permitted to emigrate.
When in 1796 it was made known that groups of Jews had already
immigrated into the Kiev, Chernigov and Novgorod-Syeversk Provinces, it was
likewise granted there to utilize the right of the merchant guild and the
townsman class. The pre-Revolution Jewish Encyclopedia writes: The ukase of
1791 laid the groundwork for setting up the Pale of Settlement, even if it
wasnt so intended. Under the conditions of the then-obtaining social and civic
order in general, and of Jewish life in particular, the administration could not
consider bringing about a particularly onerous situation and conclude for them
exceptional laws, which among other things would restrict the right of
residency. In the context of its time, this ukase did not contain that which in this
respect would have brought the Jews into a less favorable condition than the
Christians. The ukase of 1791 in no way limited the rights of Jews in the choice
of residency, created no special borders, and for Jews the way was opened into
new regions, into which in general people could not emigrate. The main point of
the decree was not concerned with their Jewishness, but that they were traders;
the question was not considered from the national or religious point of view, but
only from the viewpoint of usefulness.
This ukase of 1791, which actually granted privileges to Jewish merchants
in comparison to Christian ones, was in the course of time the basis for the
future Pale of Settlement, which almost until the Revolution cast as it were a
dark shadow over Russia. By itself, however, the ukase of 1791 was not so
oppressive as to prevent a small Jewish colony from emerging in St Petersburg
by the end of the reign of Catherine II. Here lived the famous tax-leaser Abram
Peretz and some of the merchants close to him, and also, while the religious
struggle was in full swing, the rabbi Avigdor Chaimovitch and his opponent, the
famous hassidic Tzadik Zalman Boruchovitch.
In 1793 and 1795 the second and third Partition of Poland took place, and
the Jewish population from Lithuania, Poldolia, and Volhynia, numbering
almost a million, came under Russias jurisdiction. This increase in population
was a very significant event, though for a long time not recognized as such. It
later influenced the fate of both Russia and the Jewry of East Europe. After
centuries-long wandering Jewry came under one roof, in a single great
congregation.

In the now vastly-expanded region of Jewish settlement, the same questions

came up as before. The Jews obtained rights of merchant guilds and townsmen,
which they had not possessed in Poland, and they got the right to equal
participation in the class-municipal self-government, then had to accept the
restrictions of this status: they could not migrate into the cities of the inner-
Russian provinces, and were liable to be moved out of the villages.
 With the now huge extent of the Jewish population, the Russian regime no
longer had a way to veil the fact that the Jews continued to live in the villages
simply by modeling it as a temporary visit. A burning question was whether
the economic condition could tolerate so many tradesmen and traders living
amongst the peasants. In order to defuse the problem, many shtetl were made
equal to cities. Thus, the legal possibility came about for Jews to continue living
there. But with the large number of Jews in the country and the high population
density in the cities, that was no solution.
It seemed to be a natural way out that the Jews would take advantage of the
possibility offered by Catherine to settle in the huge, scarcely-occupied New
Russia. The new settlers were offered inducements, but this did not succeed in
setting a colonization movement into motion. Even the freedom of the new
settlers from taxes appeared not to be attractive enough to induce such a
migration. Thus Catherine decided in 1794 to induce the Jews to emigrate with
contrary measures: the Jews were relocated out of the villages. At the same
time, she decided to assess the entire Jewish population with a tax that was
double that paid by the Christians. Such a tax had already been paid for a long
time by the Old Believers, but applied to the Jews, this law proved to be neither
effective nor of long duration.
Those were the last regulations of Catherine. From the end of 1796 Paul I
reigned. The Jewish Encyclopedia evaluates him in this way: The time of the
angry rule of Paul I passed well for the Jews... All edicts of Paul I concerning
the Jews indicate that the monarch was tolerant and benevolent toward the
Jewish population. When the interest of Jews conflicted with Christians, Paul I
by no means automatically sided with the Christian. Even when in 1797 he
ordered measures to reduce the power of the Jews and the spirituals over the
peasants, that was actually directed against the Jews: the point was the
protection of the peasants. Paul recognized also the right of the Hasidim not to
have to live in secrecy. He extended the right of Jews to belong to the merchant-
and townsmen-class even to the Courland Province which was no Polish
inheritance, and later, it also did not belong to the Pale of Settlement. Consistent
with that policy, he denied the respective petitions of the parishes of Kovno,
Kamenez-Podolsk, Kiev and Vilna, to be permitted to move the Jews out of
their cities.
Paul had inherited the stubborn resistance of the Polish landholders against
any changing of their rights; among these was the right over the Jews and the
right to hold court over them. They misused these rights often. Thus the
Complaint of the Jews of Berdychiv [Ukraine] against the princes of Radziwill
stated: in order to hold our religious services, we must first pay gold to those to
whom the prince has leased our faith, and against Catherines former favorite
Simon Zorich: one ought not to have to pay him for the air one breathes. In
Poland many shtetl and cities were the possession of nobles, and the landowners
assessed arbitrary and opportunistic levies that the residents had to pay.
Derzhavin And The Belarus Famine

Since the start of the reign of Paul I there was a great famine in White Russia,
especially in the province of Minsk. The poet Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin,
then serving as Senator, was commissioned to go there and determine its cause
and seek a solution for which task he received no money to buy grain, but
instead had the right to confiscate possessions of negligent landowners, sell
their stockpile and distribute them.
Derzhavin was not just a great poet, but also an outstanding statesman who
left behind unique proofs of his effectiveness which merits examination. The
famine, as Derzhavin confirmed, was unimaginable. He writes when I arrived
in White Russia, I personally convinced myself of the great scarcity of grain
among the villagers. Due to the very serious hunger virtually all nourished
themselves from fermented grass, mixed with a tiny portion of meal or pearl
barley. The peasants were malnourished and sallow like dead people. In order to
remedy this, I found out which of the rich landowners had grain in their
storehouses, took it to the town center and distributed it to the poor; and I
commanded the goods of a Polish Count in view of such pitiless greed to be
yielded to a trustee. After the nobleman was made aware of the dire situation he
awoke from his slumber or better, from his shocking indifference toward
humanity: he used every means to feed the peasants by acquiring grain from
neighboring provinces and when after two months the harvest time arrived and
the famine ended. When Derzhavin visited the provincial government, he so
pursued the noble rulers and district police captains that the nobility banded
together and sent the Czar a scurrilous complaint against him.
Derzhavin discovered that the Jewish schnapps distillers exploited the
alcoholism of the peasants: After I had discovered that the Jews from profit-
seeking use the lure of drink to beguile grain from the peasants, convert it into
brandy and therewith cause a famine. I commanded that they should close their
distilleries in the village Liosno. I informed myself from sensible inhabitants as
well as nobles, merchants, and villagers about the manner of life of the Jews,
their occupations, their deceptions and all their pettifogging with which they
afflict the poor dumb villages with hunger; and on the other hand, by what
means one could protect them from the common pack and how to facilitate for
them an honorable and respectable way out to enable them to become useful
citizens.
Afterwards, in the autumn months, Derzhavin described many evil
practices of the Polish landlords and Jewish leasers in his Memorandum on the
mitigation of famine in White Russia and on the lifestyles of the Jews, which he
also made known to the czar and the highest officials of state. This
Memorandum is a very comprehensive document that evaluates the conditions
inherited from the Poles as well as the possibilities for overcoming the poverty
of the peasants, describing the peculiarities of the Jewish way of life of that time
and includes a proposal for reform in comparison to Prussia and Austria.
The very explicit practical presentation of the recommended measures
makes this the first work of an enlightened Russian citizen concerning Jewish
life in Russia, in those first years in which Russia acquired Jews in a large mass.
That makes it a work of special interest. The Memorandum consists of two
parts: (1) on the residence of White Russian in general (in reviews of the
Memorandum we usually find no mention of this important part) and (2) on the
Jews.
In part one, Derzhavin begins by establishing that the agricultural economy
was in shambles. The peasants there were lazy on the job, not clever, they
procrastinate every small task and are sluggish in field work. Year in, year out
they eat unwinnowed corn: in the spring, Kolotucha or Bolotucha from eggs
and rye meal. In summer they content themselves with a mixture of a small
amount of some grain or other with chopped and cooked grass. They are so
weakened, that they stagger around.
The local Polish landlords are not good proprietors. They do not manage
the property themselves, but lease it out, a Polish custom. But for the lease there
are no universal rules protecting the peasants from overbearing or to keep the
business aspect from falling apart. Many greedy leasers, by imposing hard work
and oppressive taxes bring the people into a bad way and transform the into
poor, homeless peasants. This lease is all the worst for being short-term, made
for 1-3 years at a time so that the leaser hastens to get his advantage from it
without regard to the exhausting of the estate.
The emaciation of the peasants was sometimes even worse: several
landlords that lease the traffic in spirits in their villages to the Jews, sign
stipulations that the peasants may only buy their necessities from these leasers
[at triple price]; likewise the peasants may not sell their product to anyone
except the Jewish lease holder, cheaper than the market price. Thus they
plunge the villagers into misery, and especially when they distribute again their
hoarded grain they must finally give a double portion; whoever does not do it is
punished. The villagers are robbed of every possibility to prosper and be full.
Then he develops in more detail the problem of the liquor distilling.
Schnapps was distilled by the landlords, the landed nobility [Szlachta] of the
region, the priests, monks, and Jews. Of the almost million Jews, two to three
thousand lived in the villages and lived mainly from the liquor traffic. The
peasants, after bringing in the harvest, are sweaty and careless in what they
spend; they drink, eat, enjoy themselves, pay the Jews for their old debts and
then, whatever they ask for drinks. For this reason the shortage is already
manifest by winter... In every settlement there is at least one, and in several
settlements quite a few taverns built by the landlords, where for their advantage
and that of the Jewish lease-holders, liquor is sold day and night... There the
Jews trick them out of not only the life-sustaining grain, but that which is sown
in the field, field implements, household items, health and even their life. And
all that is sharpened by the mores of the koleda ... Jews travel especially during
the harvest in autumn through the villages, and after they have made the farmer
along with his whole family drunk, drive them into debt and take from them
every last thing needed to survive.... In that they box the drunkards ears and
plunder him, the villager is plunged into the deepest misery. He lists also other
reasons for the impoverishing of the peasants.
Doubtless behind these fateful distilleries stand the Polish landlords.
Proprietor and leaser acted in behalf of the owner and attend to making a profit:
To this class Gessen asserts belonged not just Jews but also Christians
especially priests. But the Jews were an irreplaceable, active and very inventive
link in the chain of exploitation of these illiterate emaciated peasants that had
no rights of their own. If the White Russian settlement had not been injected
with Jewish tavern managers and leasers, then the wide-spread system of
exploitation would not have functioned, and removing the Jewish links in the
chain would have ended it.
After this Derzhavin recommended energetic measures, as for example for
the expurgation of these burdens of peasant life. The landlords would need to
attend to this problem. Only they alone who are responsible for the peasants
should be allowed to distill liquor under their own... supervision and not from
far-removed places, and to see to it, that every year a supply of grain for
themselves and the peasants would be on hand, and indeed as much as would
be needed for good nutrition. If the danger arises that this is not done, then the
property is to be confiscated for the state coffers. The schnapps distilling is to
begin no sooner than the middle of September and end middle of April, i.e. the
whole time of land cultivation is to be free of liquor consumption. In addition,
liquor is not to be sold during worship services or at night. Liquor stores should
only be permitted in the main streets, near the markets, mills and establishments
where foreigners gather.
But all the superfluous and newly-built liquor stores, whose number has
greatly increased since the annexation of White Russia are immediately to cease
use for that purpose: the sale of liquor in them to be forbidden. In villages and
out-of-the-way places there should not be any, that the peasant not sink into
drunkenness. Jews however should not be permitted to sell liquor either by
the glass or the keg... nor should they be the brew masters in the distilleries,
and they should not be allowed to lease the liquor stores. Koledas are also to
be forbidden; as well as the short-term leasing of operations. By means of
exacting stipulations the leaser is to be prevented from working an operation
into the ground. Market abuse to be forbidden under threat of punishment, by
which the landlords do not permit their peasants to buy what they need
somewhere else, or to sell their surplus somewhere other than to their
proprietor. There were still other economic proposals: in this manner the
scarcity of food can in the future be prevented in the White Russian Province.
In the second part of the Memorandum, Derzhavin, going out from the task
given by the Senate, submitted a suggestion for the transformation of the life of
the Jews in the Russian Kingdom not in isolation, but rather in the context of
the misery of White Russia and with the goal to improve the situation. But here
he set himself the assignment to give a brief overview of Jewish history,
especially the Polish period in order to explain the current customs of the Jews.
Among others, he used his conversations with the Berlin-educated enlightened
Jew, physician Ilya Frank, who put his thoughts down in writing.
The Jewish popular teachers mingle mystic-Talmudic pseudo-exegesis of
the Bible with the true spirit of the teachings... They expound strict laws with
the goal of isolating the Jews from other peoples and to instill a deep hatred
against every other religion... Instead of cultivating a universal virtue, they
contrive... an empty ceremony of honoring God... The moral character of the
Jews has changed in the last century to their disadvantage, and in consequence
they have become pernicious subjects... In order to renew the Jews morally and
politically, they have to be brought to the point of returning to the original purity
of their religion... The Jewish reform in Russia must begin with the foundation
of public schools, in which the Russian, German and Jewish languages would
be taught.
What kind of prejudice is it to believe that the assimilation of secular
knowledge is tantamount to a betrayal of religion and folk and that working the
land is not suitable for a Jew? Derzhavin declined in his Memorandum a
suggestion by Nota Chaimovitsh Notkin, a major merchant from Shklov, whom
he had also met. Although Notkin demurred from the most important
conclusions and suggestions of Derzhavin that had to do with Jews, he was at
the same time in favor, if possible, of excluding the Jews from the production of
liquor; and saw it as needful for them to get an education and pursue a
productive career, preferably working with their hands, whereby he also held
out the possibility of emigration into the fruitful steppe for the purpose of
raising sheep and crops.
Following the explanation of Frank who rejected the power of the Kehilot,
Derzhavin proceeded from the same general consequences: The original
principles of pure worship and ethics of the Jews had been transformed into
false concepts, by which the simple Jewish people is misled, and constantly
is so led, so much so that between them and those of other faiths a wall has been
built that cannot be broken through, which has been made firm, a wall that
firmly binds the Jews together and, surrounded by darkness, separates them
from their fellow citizens. Thus in raising their children they pay plenty for
Talmud instruction and that without time limit ... As long as the students
continue in their current conditions, there is no prospect for a change in their
ways.... They believe themselves to be the true worshippers of God, and despise
everyone of a different faith... There the people are brought to a constant
expectation of the Messiah... They believe their Messiah, by overthrowing all
earthly things will rule over them in flesh and blood and restore to them their
former kingdom, fame and glory.
 Of the youths he wrote: they marry all too young, sometimes before they
reach ten years old, and though nubile, they are not strong enough. Regarding
the Kahal system: the inner-Jewish collection of levies provides to the Kehilot
every year an enviable sum of income that is incomparably higher than the state
taxes that are raised from individuals in the census lists. The Kahal elders do
not excuse anyone from the accounting. As a result, their poor masses find
themselves in the condition of severe emaciation and great poverty, and there
are many of them... In contrast, the members of the kahal are rich, and live in
superfluity; by ruling over both levers of power, the spiritual and secular,... they
have a great power over the people. In this way they hold.them ... in great
poverty and fear. The Kehilot issues to the people every possible command...
which must be performed with such exactitude and speed, that one can only
wonder.
Derzhavin identified the nub of the problem thusly: the Jews great
number in White Russia ... is itself a heavy burden for the land on account of
the disproportion to that of the crop farmers... This disproportion is the
outstanding one of several important reasons that produces here a shortage of
grain and other edible stores... Not one of them was a crop farmer at that time,
yet each possessed and gobbled up more grain than the peasant with his large
family, who had harvested it by the sweat of his brow... Above all, in the
villages they ... are occupied in giving the peasant all their necessities on credit,
at an extraordinary rate of interest; and thus the peasant, who at some time or
other became a debtor to them, can no longer get free of it. Arching over this
are the frivolous landlords that put their villages into Jewish hands, not just
temporarily but permanently. The landowners however are happy to be able to
shift everything on to the Jews: according to their own words, they regard the
Jews as the sole reason for the wasting of the peasants and the landlord only
rarely acknowledges that he, if they were removed from his holdings, would
suffer no small loss, since he receives from them no small income from the
lease.
Thus Derzhavin did not neglect to examine the matter from a variety of
angles: In fairness to the Jews we must point out also that during this grain
shortage they have taken care to feed not a few hungry villagersthough
everyone also knows that that came with a bill: upon the harvest being brought
in, they will get it back 100-fold. In a private report to the Attorney General,
Derzhavin wrote, It is hard not to err by putting all the blame on one side. The
peasants booze away their grain with the Jews and suffer under its shortage. The
landholders cannot forbid drunkenness, for they owe almost all their income to
the distilling of liquor. And all the blame cannot be placed even on the Jews,
that they take the last morsel of bread away from the peasant to earn their own
life sustenance.
To Ilya Frank, Derzhavin once said, since the providence of this tiny
scattered people has preserved them until the present, we too must take care for
their protection. And in his report he wrote with the uprightness of that time,
if the Most High Providence, to the end of some unknown purpose, leaves on
account of His purposes this dangerous people to live on the earth, then
governments under whose scepter they have sought protection must bear it...
They are thus obligated extend their protection to the Jews, so that they may be
useful both to themselves and to the society in which they dwell.
Because of all his observations in White Russia, and of his conclusion, and
of all he wrote in the Memorandum, and especially because of all these lines,
and probably also because he praised the keen vision of the great Russian
monarchs which forbade the immigration and travel of these clever robbers into
their realm, Derzhavin is spoken of as a fanatical enemy of Jews, a great Anti-
Semite. He is accused though unjustly, as we have seen of imputing the
drunkenness and poverty of the White Russian peasant exclusively to the Jews,
and his positive measures were characterized as given without evidence, to
serve his personal ambition. But that he was in no wise prejudiced against the
Jews, is indicated in that (1) his whole Memorandum emerged in 1800 in
response to the actual misery and hunger of the peasants, (2) the goal was to do
well by both the White Russian peasant and the Jews, (3) he distinguished them
economically and (4) his desire was to orient the Jews toward a real productive
activity, of whom, as Catherine planned, a part first and foremost was supposed
to have been relocated in territories that were not closed.
As a critical difficulty Derzhavin saw the instability and transientness of the
Jewish population, of which scarcely 1/6 was included in the census. Without a
special, extraordinary effort it is difficult to count them accurately, because,
being in cities, shtetl, manor courts, villages, and taverns, they constantly move
back and forth, they do not identify themselves as local residents, but as guests
that are here from another district or colony. Moreover, they all look alike...
and have the same name, and have no surname; and not only that, all wear the
same black garments: one cannot distinguish them and misidentifies them when
they are registered or identified, especially in connection with judicial
complaints and investigations. Therein the Kehilot takes care not to disclose
the real number, in order not unduly to burden their wealthy with taxes for the
number registered.
Derzhavin sought however a comprehensive solution to reduce the
number of Jews in the White Russian villages... without causing damage to
anyone and thus to ease the feeding of the original residents; yet at the same
time, for those that should remain, to provide better and less degrading
possibilities for earning their sustenance. In addition, he probed how to
reduce their fanaticism and, without retreating in the slightest from the rule of
toleration toward different religions, to lead them by a barely-noticed way to
enlightenment; and after expunging their hatred of people of other faiths, above
all to bring them to give up their besetting intention of stealing foreign goods.
The goal was to find a way to separate the freedom of religious conscience from
freedom from punishment of evil deeds.
 Thereafter he laid out by layers and explicitly the measures to be
recommended, and in doing so gave proof of his economic and statesmanlike
competence. First, that the Jews should have no occasion for any kind of
irritation, to send them into flight or even to murmur quietly, they are to be
reassured of protection and favor by a manifest of the Czar, in which should be
strengthened the principle of tolerance toward their faith and the maintenance of
the privileges granted by Catherine, only with one small change to the previous
principles. (But those that will not submit to these principles shall be given
the freedom to emigrate a demand that far exceeded in point of freedom the
20th century Soviet Union).
Immediately thereafter it states: after a specific time interval, after which all
new credit is temporarily forbidden, all claims of debt between Jews and
Christians to be ordered, documented, and cleared in order to restore the earlier
relation of trust so that in the future not the slightest obstruction should be
found for the transformation of the Jews to a different way of life... for the
relocation into other districts or in the old places, for the assignment of a new
life conditions.
Free of debt, the Jews are thus to be made as soon as possible into freemen.
All reforms for the equalization of debt of poor people is to be applied to poor
Jews, to deflect the payment of Kahal debts or for the furnishings for migrants.
From the one group, no tax is to be levied for three years from the other, for
six years. Instead, that money is to be dedicated to the setting up of factories and
work places for these Jews. Landowners must abandon obligating Jews in their
shtetls to set up various factories, and instead begin on their estates to cultivate
grain, in order that they may earn their bread with their own hands, but under
no circumstance is liquor to be sold anywhere, secretly or openly, or these
landholders would themselves lose their rights to the production of liquor.
It was also non-negotiable to carry out a universal, exact census of the
population under responsibility of the Kahal elders. For those that had no
property to declare as merchant or townsman, two new classes were to be
created with smaller income Jews: village burgher and colonist (where the
denotation krestyanin or farmer would not be used because of its similarity to
the word Christian.) The Jewish settlers would have to be regarded as free and
not as serfs, but under no condition or pretext may they dare to take Christian
man-or maid-servants, they may not own a single Christian peasant, nor to
expand themselves into the domain of magistrates and town fathers, so that they
not gain any special rights over Christians. After they have declared their wish
to be enrolled in a particular status, then must the necessary number of young
men be sent to Petersburg, Moscow, or Riga one group to learn the keeping
of merchant books, second to learn a trade, the third to attend schools for
agriculture and land management.
Meanwhile some energetic and precise Jews should be selected as
deputies... for all these areas where land is designated for colonization. (There
follows minutiae on the arrangements of plans, surveying the land, housing
construction, the order to release different groups of settlers, their rights in
transit, the grace-period in which they would remain tax-free all these details
that Derzhavin laid out so carefully we pass by.) On the inner ordering of the
Jewish congregation: in order to place the Jews ...under the secular
authorities ... just the same as everyone else, the Kehilot may not continue in
any form. Together with the abolishment of the Kehilot is likewise abolished
all previous profiteering assessments, which the Kehilot raised from the Jewish
people... and at the same time, the secular taxes are to be assessed... as with the
other subjects (i.e. not doubled), and the schools and synagogues must be
protected by law. The males may not marry younger than 17 nor the females
than 15 years.
Then there is a section on education and enlightenment of the Jews. The
Jewish schools to the 12th year, and thereafter the general schools, are to
become more like those of other religions; those however that have achieved
distinction in the high sciences are to be received in the academies and
universities as honorary associates, doctors, professors but they are not to
be taken into the rank of officers and staff officers, because although they may
also be taken into the military service, they will not take up arms against the
enemy on Saturday, which in fact often does happen. Presses for Jewish books
are to be constructed. Along with synagogues are to be constructed Jewish
hospitals, poor houses, and orphanages.
Thus Derzhavin concluded quite self-consciously: thus, this cross-grained
[scattered] people known as Jews... in this its sad condition will observe an
example of order. Especially regarding enlightenment: This first point will
bear fruit if not today and immediately, definitely in the coming times, or at
worst after several generations, in unnoticed way, and then the Jews would
become genuine subjects of the Russian throne. While Derzhavin was
composing his Memorandum, he also made it known what the Kehilot thought
about it, and made it clear that he was by no means making himself their friend.
In the official answers their rejection was formulated cautiously. It stated,
the Jews are not competent for cultivating grain nor accustomed to it, and their
faith is an obstacle... They see no other possibilities than their current
occupations, which serve their sustenance, and they do not need such, but would
like to remain in their current condition. The Kehilot saw moreover, that the
report entailed their own obsolescence, the end of their source of income, and so
began, quietly, but stubbornly and tenaciously, to work against Derzhavins
whole proposal.
This opposition expressed itself, according to Derzhavin, by means of a
complaint filed by a Jewess from Liosno to the Czar, in which she alleged that,
in a liquor distillery, Derzhavin horrifically beat her with a club, until she,
being pregnant, gave birth to a dead infant. The Senate launched an
investigation. Derzhavin answered: As I was a quarter hour long in this factory,
I not only did not strike any Jewess, but indeed did not even see one. He
sought a personal reception by the Czar. Let me be imprisoned, but I will
reveal the idiocy of the man that has made such claims... How can your
Highness... believe such a foolish and untrue complaint? (The Jew that had
taken the lying complaint was condemned to one year in the penitentiary, but
after 2 or 3 months Derzhavin accomplished his being set free, this being now
under the reign of Alexander I.)
The Czar Paul I was murdered in May 1801 and was unable to come to any
resolution in connection with Derzhavins Memorandum. It led at the time to
small practical results, as one could have expected, since Derzhavin lost his
position in the change of court.
Not until the end of 1802 was the Committee for the Assimilation of the
Jews established to examine Derzhavins detailed Memorandum and prepare
corresponding recommendations. The committee consisted of two Polish
magnates close to Alexander I: Prince Adam [Jerzy] Czartoryski and Count
(Graf) Severin Potocki as well as Count Valerian Subov. Derzhavin observed
regarding all three, that they too had great holdings in Poland, and would notice
a significant loss of income if the Jews were to be removed, and that the
private interests of the above-mentioned Worthies would outweigh those of the
state.)
Also on the committee were Interior Minister Count Kotshubey and the
already-mentioned Justice Minister, the first in Russian historyDerzhavin
himself. Michael Speransky also worked with the committee. The committee
was charged to invite Jewish delegates from the Kehiloth of every province and
these mostly merchants of the First Guild did come. Besides that the
committee members had the right to call enlightened and well-meaning Jews of
their acquaintance. The already-known Nota Notkin, who had moved from
White Russia to Moscow and then St Petersburg; the Petersburg tax-leaser
Abram Perets, who was a close friend of Speransky; Yehuda Leib Nevachovich
and Mendel Satanaver, both friends of Perets and others. Not all took part
in the hearings, but they exercised a significant influence on the committee
members. Worthy of mention: Abram Perets son Gregory was condemned in
the Decembrist trial and exiled probably only because he had discussed the
Jewish Question with Pavel Pestel, but without suspecting anything of the
Decembrist conspiracy and because his grandson was the Russian Secretary of
State, a very high position. Nevachovich, a humanist (but no cosmopolitan) who
was deeply tied to Russian cultural life then a rarity among Jews published
in Russian The Crying Voice of the Daughter of Judah (1803) in which he urged
Russian society to reflect on the restrictions of Jewish rights, and admonished
the Russians to regard Jews as their countrymen, and take the Jews among them
into Russian society.
The committee came to an overwhelmingly-supported resolution: The
Jews are to be guided into the general civil life and education... To steer them
toward productive work it should be made easier for them to become
employed in trades and commerce, the constriction of the right of free mobility
should be lessened; they must become accustomed to wearing ordinary apparel,
for the custom of wearing clothes that are despised strengthens the custom to
be despised. But the most acute problem was the fact that Jews, on account of
the liquor trade, dwelled in the villages at all. Notkin strove to win the
committee to the view of letting the Jews continue to live there, and only to take
measures against possible abuses on their part.
The charter of the committee led to tumult in the Kehiloth, Gessen wrote.
A special convocation of their deputies in 1803 in Minsk resolved to petition
our Czar, may his fame become still greater, that they (the Worthies) assume no
innovations for us. They decided to send certain delegates to Petersburg,
explained, that an assembly had been held for that purpose, and even called for
a three-day Jewish fast. Unrest gripped the whole Pale of Settlement. Quite
apart from the threatened expulsion of Jews from the villages, the Kehiloth took
a negative stance toward the cultural question out of concern to preserve their
own way of life. As answer to the main points of the Recommendation the
Kehiloth explained that the Reform must in any case be postponed 15-20 years.
Derzhavin wrote there were from their side various rebuttals aimed to
leave everything as it was. In addition, Gurko, a White Russian landowner sent
Derzhavin a letter he had received: a Jew in White Russia had written him
regarding one of his plenipotentiaries in Petersburg. It said that they had, in the
name of all Kehilot of the world, put the cherem or herem, (i.e. the ban) on
Derzhavin as a Persecutor, and had gathered a million to be used as gifts
(bribes) for this situation and had forwarded it to St Petersburg. They appealed
for all efforts to be applied to the removal of Derzhavin as Attorney General,
and if that were not possible to seek his life. However the thing they wanted to
achieve was not to be forbidden to sell liquor in the village tavern, and in order
to make it easier to advance this business, they would put together opinions
from foreign regions, from different places and peoples, on how the situation of
the Jews could be improved. In fact such opinions, sometimes in French,
sometimes, in German, began to be sent to the Committee.
Besides this, Nota Notkin became the central figure that organized the little
Jewish congregation of Petersburg. In 1803 he submitted a brief to the
Committee in which he sought to paralyze the effect of the proposal submitted
by Derzhavin. Derzhavin writes that Notkin came to him one day and asked,
with feigned well-wishing, that he, Derzhavin, should not take a stand all
alone against his colleagues on the Committee, who all are on the side of the
Jews; whether he would not accept 100,000 or, if that was too little, 200,000
rubles, only so that he could be of one mind with all his colleagues on the
committee. Derzhavin decided to disclose this attempt at bribery to the Czar
and prove it to him with Gurkos letter. He thought such strong proofs prove
effective and the Czar would start to be wary of the people that surrounded him
and protected the Jews. Speransky also informed the Czar of it, but Speransky
was fully committed to the Jews, and from the first meeting of the Jewish
Committee it became apparent that all members represented the view that the
liquor distilling should continue in the hands of Jews as before.
 Derzhavin opposed it. Alexander bore himself ever more coldly toward him
and dismissed his Justice Minister shortly thereafter (1803). Beside this,
Derzhavins papers indicate that whether in military or civil service he had
come into disfavor. He retired from public life in 1805.
Derzhavin foresaw much that developed in the problematic Russo-Judaic
relationship throughout the entire 19th century, even if not in the exact and
unexpected form that it took in the event. He expressed himself coarsely, as was
customary then, but he did not intend to oppress the Jews; on the contrary, he
wanted to open to the Jews paths to a more free and productive life.
 Chapter 2. During the Reign of Alexander 1st

At the end of 1804, the Committee in charge of the Organisation of the Jews
concluded its work by drafting a Regulation on Jews (known as the
Regulation of 1804), the first collection of laws in Russia concerning Jews.
The Committee explained that its aim was to improve the condition of the Jews,
to direct them towards a useful activity by opening this path exclusively for
their own good and by discarding anything that might divert them from it,
without calling for coercive measures.85 The Regulation established the
principle of equal civil rights for Jews (Article 42): All Jews who live in
Russia, who have recently settled there, or who have come from foreign
countries for their commercial affairs, are free and are under the strict protection
of the laws in the same way other Russian subjects are. (In the eyes of
Professor Gradovsky, We can not but see in this article the desire to assimilate
this people to the whole population of Russia.86)
The Regulation gave the Jews greater opportunities than Derzhavins
original proposals; thus, in order to create textile or leather factories, or to move
to agricultural economy on virgin lands, it proposed that a government subsidy
be directly paid. Jews were given the right to acquire land without serfs, but
with the possibility of hiring Christian workers. Jews who owned factories,
merchants, and craftsmen had the right to leave the Pale of Settlement for a
time, for business purposes, thus easing the borders of this newly established
area. (All that was promised for the current of the coming year was the
abrogation of double royalties87, but it soon disappeared.) All the rights of the
Jews were reaffirmed: the inviolability of their property, individual liberty, the
profession of their religion, their community organisation in other words, the
Kehalim system was left without significant changes (which, in fact,
undermined the idea of a fusion of the Jewish world within the Russian state):
the Kehalim retained their old right to collect royalties, which conferred on
them a great authority, but without the ability of increasing them; Religious
85 Hessen, Istoria evreskogo naroda v Rossii (History of the Jewish People in Russia), in 2
volumes, t. 1, Leningrad, 1925, p. 149.
86 M. Kovalevsky, Ravnopravie evreev i ego vragi (The Equality of the Rights of Jews and
their Adversaries), in Schit, literary collection edited by L. Andrev, M. Gorky and F.
Sologoub, 3rd edition completed, Russian Society for the Study of the lives of Jews,
Moscow, 1916, p. 117.
87 Double tax instituted for the Jews by Catherine (to whom the old believers had long been
subjected), but which was hardly applied.
punishments and anathemas (Herem) were forbidden, which assured liberty to
the Hassidim. In accordance with the wishes of the Kehalim, the project of
establishing Jewish schools of general education was abandoned, but all
Jewish children are allowed to study with other children without discrimination
in all schools, colleges, and all Russian universities, and in these
establishments no child shall be under any pretext deviated from his religion or
forced to study what might be contrary or opposed to him. Jews who, through
their abilities, will attain a meritorious level in universities in medicine, surgery,
physics, mathematics, and other disciplines, will be recognised as such and
promoted to university degrees. It was considered essential that the Jews learn
the language of their region, change their external appearance and adopt family
names. In conclusion, the Committee pointed out that in other countries
nowhere were used means so liberal, so measured, and so appropriate to the
needs of the Jews. J. Hessen agrees that the Regulation of 1804 imposed fewer
restrictions on Jews than the Prussian Regulations of 1797. Especially since the
Jews possessed and retained their individual liberty, which a mass of several
million Russian peasants subjected to serfdom did not enjoy.88 The Regulation
of 1804 belongs to the number of acts imbued with the spirit of tolerance.89
The Messenger of Europe, one of the most read journals of the times wrote:
Alexander knows that the vices we attribute to the Jewish nation are the
inevitable consequences of oppression that has burdened it for many centuries.
The goal of the new law is to give the State useful citizens, and to Jews a
homeland.90
However, the Regulation did not resolve the most acute problem in
accordance with the wishes of all Jews, namely the Jewish population, the
Kehalim deputies, and the Jewish collaborators of the Committee. The
Regulation stipulated that: No one among the Jews in any village or town,
can own any form of stewardship of inns or cabarets, under their name nor
under the name of a third party, nor are they allowed to sell alcohol or live in
such places91 and proposed that the entire Jewish population leave the
countryside within three years, by the beginning of 1808. (We recall that such a
measure had already been advocated under Paul in 1797, even before the
Derzhavin project appeared: not that all Jews without exception were to be
distanced from the villages, but in order that by its mass, the Jewish population
in the villages would not exceed the economic possibilities of the peasants as a
productive class, it is proposed to reduce the number of them in the
agglomerations of the districts.92 This time it was proposed to direct the
majority of the Jews to agricultural labour in the virgin lands of the Pale of
Settlement, New Russia, but also the provinces of Astrakhan and the Caucasus,
exonerating them for ten years of the royalties they up to then had to pay, with
88 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 148-158; JE, t. 1, pp. 799-800.
89 JE, t. 13, pp. 158-159.
90 Hessen, t. 1, p. 158-159.
91 JE, t. 3, p. 79.
92 Hessen, t. 1, p. 128.
the right to receive a loan from the Treasury for their enterprises to be
reimbursed progressively after ten years of franchise; to the most fortunate, it
was proposed to acquire land in personal and hereditary ownership with the
possibility of having them exploited by agricultural workers.93
In its refusal to allow distillation, the Committee explained: As long as
this profession remains accessible to them which, in the end, exposes them to
the recriminations, contempt, and even hatred of inhabitants, the general outcry
towards them will not cease.94 Moreover, Can we consider this measure [of
removing the Jews from villages] as repressive when they are offered so many
other means not only to live in ease, but also to enrich themselves in agriculture,
industry, crafts; and that they are also given the possibility of possessing land in
full ownership? How could this people be regarded as oppressed by the
abolition of a single branch of activity in a State in which they are offered a
thousand other activities in fertile, uninhabited areas suitable for the cultivation
of cereals and other agricultural production?95
These are compelling arguments. However, Hessen finds that the text of the
Committee testifies to a naive look on the nature of the economic life of a
people [consisting in] believing that economic phenomena can be changed in a
purely mechanical way, by decree.96 From the Jewish side, the projected
relocation of the Jews from villages and the ban imposed on them on making
alcohol, the secular occupation of the Jews97, was perceived as a terribly cruel
decision. (And it was in these terms that it was condemned by Jewish
historiography fifty and even a hundred years later.)
Given the liberal opinions of Alexander I, his benevolence towards the
Jews, his perturbed character, his weak will (without a doubt forever broken by
his accession to the throne at the cost of his fathers violent death), it is unlikely
that the announced deportation of the Jews would have been energetically
conducted; even if the reign had followed a peaceful course, it would have
undoubtedly been spread out over time.
But soon after the adoption of the 1804 Regulations, the threat of war in
Europe was outlined, followed by the application of measures favouring the
Jews by Napoleon, who united a Sanhedrin of Jewish deputies in Paris. The
whole Jewish problem then took an unexpected turn. Bonaparte organised in
Paris a meeting of the Jews whose main aim was to offer the Jewish nation
various advantages and to create a link between the Jews scattered throughout
Europe. Thus, in 1806, Alexander I ordered a new committee to be convened to

93 V. N. Nikitin, Evrei i zemledeltsy: Istoritcheskoe. zakonodatelnoe. administra-tivnoc i

bylovoc polojenie kolonii so vremeni ikh vozniknivenia do nachikh dne (The Jews in
Agriculture: Historical, legal, administrative, practice of the colonies from their origin to the
present day), 1807-1887, Saint Petersburg, 1887, pp. 6-7.
94 Prince N. N. Golitsyn, Istoria rousskogo zakonodatelstva o evreiakh (History of Russian
Legislation for the Jews), Saint Petersburg, t. 1, 1649-1825, p. 430.
95 Ibidem, t. 1, pp. 439-440.
96 Ibidem.
97 JE, t. 3. p. 79.
examine whether special steps should be taken, and postpone the relocation of
the Jews.98
As announced in 1804, the Jews were supposed to abandon the villages by
1808. But practical difficulties arose, and as early as 1807 Alexander I received
several reports highlighting the necessity of postponing the relocation. An
imperial decree was then made public, requiring all Jewish societies to elect
deputies and to propose through them the means which they consider most
suitable for successfully putting into practice the measures contained in the
Regulation of December 9th, 1804. The election of these Jewish deputies took
place in the western provinces, and their views were transmitted to St.
Petersburg. Of course, these deputies expressed the opinion that the departure
of the Jews residing in the villages had to be postponed to a much later time.
(One of the reasons given was that, in the villages, the innkeepers had free
housing, whereas in towns and cities, they would have to pay for them). The
Minister of Internal Affairs wrote in his report that the relocation of Jews
currently residing in villages to land belonging to the State will take several
decades, given their overwhelming number.99 Towards the end of 1808, the
Emperor gave orders to suspend the article prohibiting the Jews from renting
and producing alcohol, and to leave the Jews where they lived, until a
subsequent ruling.100 Immediately afterwards (1809) a new committee, said of
the Senator Popov, was instituted for the study of all problems and the
examination of the petitions formulated by the Jewish deputies. This Committee
considered it indispensable to put an energetic end to the relocation of the
Jews and to retain the right to the production and trade of vodka. 101 The
Committee worked for three years and presented its report to the Emperor in
1812. Alexander I did not endorse this report: he did not wish to undermine the
importance of the previous decision and had in no way lost his desire to act in
favour of the peasants: He was ready to soften the measure of expulsion, but
not to renounce it.102 Thereupon the Great War broke out with Napoleon,
followed by the European war, and Alexanders concerns changed purpose.
Since then, displacement out of the villages never was initiated as a
comprehensive measure in the entire Pale of Settlement, but at most in the form
of specific decisions in certain places.103
During the war, according to a certain source, the Jews were the only
inhabitants not to flee before the French army, neither in the forests nor inland;
in the neighbourhood of Vilnius, they refused to obey Napoleons order to join
his army, but supplied him forage and provisions without a murmur;

98 G. R. Derzhavin, works in 9 vol., 2nd ed., Saint Petersburg, 1864-1883, t. 6, 1876, pp. 761-
762.
99 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 163-165.
100 JE, t. 1. p. 801.
101 Ibidem.
102 Hessen, 1.1, p. 163-167.
103 JE, t. 5, p. 859.
nevertheless, in certain places it was necessary to resort to requisitions. 104
Another source reports that the Jewish population suffered greatly from the
abuses committed by Napoleons soldiers, and that many synagogues were set
on fire, but goes even further by stating that Russian troops were greatly
helped by what was called the Jewish post, set up by Jewish merchants, which
transmitted the information with a celerity unknown at the time (inns serving as
relay); they even used Jews as couriers for the connections between the
various detachments of the Russian army. When the Russian army reassumed
possession of the land, the Jews welcomed the Russian troops with admiration,
bringing bread and alcohol to the soldiers. The future Nicholas I, Grand Duke
at that time, noted in his diary: It is astonishing that they [Jews] remained
surprisingly faithful to us in 1812 and even helped us where they could, at the
risk of their lives.105 At the most critical point of the retreat of the French at the
passage of Berezina, the local Jews communicated to the Russian command the
presumed crossing point; this episode is well known. But it was in fact a
successful ruse of General Lauranay: he was persuaded that the Jews would
communicate this information to the Russians, and the French, of course, chose
another crossing point.106
After 1814, the reunification of central Poland brought together more than
400,000 Jews. The Jewish problem was then presented to the Russian
government with more acuteness and complexity. In 1816, the Government
Council of the Kingdom of Poland, which in many areas enjoyed a separate
state existence, ordered the Jews to be expelled from their villagesthey could
also remain there, but only to work the land, and this without the help of
Christian workers. But at the request of the Kahal of Warsaw, as soon as it was
transmitted to the Emperor, Alexander gave orders to leave the Jews in place by
allowing them to engage in the trade of vodka, on the sole condition that they
should not sell it on credit.107
It is true that in the Regulations published by the Senate in 1818, the
following provisions are again found: To put an end to the coercive measures
of proprietors, which are ruinous for the peasants, for non-repayment of their
debts to the Jews, which forces them to sell their last possessions Regarding
the Jews who run inns, it is necessary to forbid them to lend money at interest,
to serve vodka on credit, to then deprive the peasants of their livestock or any
other things that are indispensable to them. 108 Characteristic trait of the entirety
of Alexanders reign: no spirit of continuation in the measures taken; the
regulations were promulgated but there was no effective control to monitor their
implementation. Same goes with the statute of 1817 with regard to the tax on
alcohol: in the provinces of Great Russia, distillation was prohibited to the
104 S. Pozner, Evrei Litvy i Beloroussii 125 let lomou nazad (The Jews of Lithuania and
Belarus 125 Years Ago), in M.J., Directory, 1939, pp. 60, 65-66.
105 PJE, t. 7. pp. 309-311.
106 Cf, Rousskaa Volia (The Russian Will), Petrograd, 1917, 22 April, p. 3.
107 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 222-223.
108 JE*, t. 3, pp. 80-81.
Jews; however, as early as 1819, this prohibition was lifted until Russian
artisans have sufficiently perfected themselves in this trade.109
Of course, Polish owners who were too concerned by their profits opposed
the eradication of Jewish distilleries in the rural areas of the western provinces;
and, at that time, the Russian Government did not dare act against them.
However, in the Chernigov province where their establishment was still recent,
the successful removal of the distilleries in the hands of owners and Jews was
undertaken in 1821, after the governor reported following a bad harvest that
the Jews hold in hard bondage the peasants of the Crown and Cossacks. 110 A
similar measure was taken in 1822 in the province of Poltava; in 1823 it was
partially extended to the provinces of Mogilev and Vitebsk. But its expansion
was halted by the pressing efforts of the Kehalim.
Thus, the struggle led over the twenty-five year reign of Alexander against
the production of alcohol by the transplantation of the Jews out of villages gave
little results.
But distilling was not the only type of production in the Pale of Settlement.
Owners leased out various assets in different sectors of the economy, here a
mill, there fishing, elsewhere bridges, sometimes a whole property, and in this
way not only peasant serfs were leased (such cases multiplied from the end of
the eighteenth century onwards111), but also the serfs churches, that is to say
orthodox churches, as several authors point out: N. I. Kostomarov, M. N.
Katkov, V. V. Choulguine. These churches, being an integral part of an estate,
were considered as belonging to the Catholic proprietor, and in their capacity as
operators, the Jews considered themselves entitled to levy money on those who
frequented these churches and on those who celebrated private offices. For
baptism, marriage, or funeral, it was necessary to receive the authorisation of a
Jew for a fee; the epic songs of Little Russia bursts with bitter complaints
against the Jewish farmers who oppress the inhabitants.112
The Russian governments had long perceived this danger: the rights of the
farmers were likely to extend to the peasant himself and directly to his work,
and the Jews should not dispose of the personal labour of the peasants, and by
means of a lease, although not being Christians, become owners of peasant
serfswhich was prohibited on several occasions both by the decree of 1784
and by the ordinances of the Senate of 1801 and 1813: the Jews cannot possess
villages or peasants, nor dispose of them under any name whatsoever.113
However, the ingenuity of the Jews and the owners managed to circumvent
what was forbidden. In 1816, the Senate discovered that the Jews had found a
means of exercising the rights of owners under the name of krestentsia, that is
to say, after agreement with the owners, they harvest the wheat and barley sown
109 Ibidem, t. 5, pp. 609, 621.
110 Ibidem, p. 612.
111 JE, t. 11, p. 492.
112 V. V. Choulguine, Tchto nam v nikh ne nravitsia: Ob antisemitism v Rossii (What we do
not like about them: Anti-Semitism in Russia). Paris, 1929, p. 129.
113 JE*, t. 3, p. 81.
by the peasants, these same peasants must first thresh and then deliver to the
distilleries leased to these same Jews; they must also watch over the oxen that
are brought to graze in their fields, provide the Jews with workers and
wagons Thus the Jews dispose of all these areas while the landlords,
receiving from them substantial rent referred to as krestentsia, sell to the Jews
all the harvest to come that are sown on their lands: one can conclude from this
that they condemn their peasants to famine.114
It is not the peasants who are, so to speak, claimed as such, but only the
krestentsia, which does not prevent the result from being the same.
Despite all the prohibitions, the practice of the krestentsia continued its
crooked ways. Its extreme intricacy resulted from the fact that many landowners
fell into debt with their Jewish farmers, receiving money from them on their
estate, which enabled the Jews to dispose of the estate and the labour of the
serfs. But when, in 1816, the Senate decreed that it was appropriate to take the
domains back from the Jews, he charged them to recover on their own the
sums they had lent. The deputies of the Kehalim immediately sent a humble
petition to his Majesty, asking him to annul this decree: the general
administrator in charge of foreign faith affairs, the Prince N.N. Golitsyn,
convinced the Emperor that inflicting punishment on only one category of
offenders with the exception of owners and officials. The landlords could still
gain if they refuse to return the capital received for the krestentsia and
furthermore keep the krestentsia for their profit; if they have abandoned their
lands to the Jews in spite of the law, they must now return the money to them.115
The future Decembrist P. I. Pestel, at that time an officer in the western
provinces, was by no means a defender of the autocracy, but an ardent
republican; he recorded some of his observations on the Jews of this region,
which were partially included in the preamble to his government programme
(Recommendations for the Provisional Supreme Government): Awaiting the
Messiah, the Jews consider themselves temporary inhabitants of the country in
which they find themselves, and so they never, on any account, want to take
care of agriculture, they tend to despise even the craftsmen, and only practice
commerce. The spiritual leaders of the Jews, who are called rabbis, keep the
people in an incredible dependence by forbidding them, in the name of faith,
any reading other than that of the Talmud A people that does not seek to
educate itself will always remain a prisoner of prejudice; the dependence of
the Jews in relation to the rabbis goes so far that any order given by the latter is
executed piously, without a murmur. The close ties between the Jews give
them the means to raise large sums of money for their common needs, in
particular to incite different authorities to concession and to all sorts of
embezzlements which are useful to them, the Jews. That they readily accede to
the condition of possessors, one can see it ostensibly in the provinces where
they have elected domicile. All commerce is in their hands, and few peasants

114 Ibidem*.
115 Ibidem*, p. 82; cf. equally Hessen, t. 1. pp. 185, 187.
are not, by means of debts, in their power; this is why they terribly ruin the
regions where they reside. The previous government [that of Catherine] has
given them outstanding rights and privileges which accentuate the evil they are
doing, for example the right not to provide recruits, the right not to announce
deaths, the right to distinct judicial proceedings subject to the decisions of the
rabbis, and they also enjoy all the other rights accorded to other Christian
ethnic groups; Thus, it can be clearly seen that the Jews form within the State,
a separate State, and enjoy more extensive rights than Christians themselves.
Such a situation cannot be perpetuated further, for it has led the Jews to show a
hostile attitude towards Christians and has placed them in a situation contrary to
the public order that must prevail in the State116.
In the final years of Alexander Is reign, economic and other type of
prohibitions against Jewish activities were reinforced. In 1818, a Senate decree
now forbade that never may Christians be placed in the service of Jews for
debts.117 In 1819, another decree called for an end to the works and services
that peasants and servants perform on behalf of Jews.118 Golitsyn, always him,
told the Council of Ministers those who dwell in the houses of the Jews not
only forget and no longer fulfil the obligations of the Christian faith, but adopt
Jewish customs and rites.119 It was then decided that Jews should no longer
employ Christians for their domestic service.120 It was believed that this
would also benefit the needy Jews who could very well replace Christian
servants.121 But this decision was not applied. (This is not surprising: among
the urban Jewish masses there was poverty and misery, for the most part, they
were wretched people who could scarcely feed themselves, 122 but the opposite
phenomenon has never been observed: the Jews would hardly work in the
service of Christians. Undoubtedly some factors opposed it, but they also
apparently had means of subsistence coming from communities between which
solidarity reigned.)
However, as early as 1823, Jewish farmers were allowed to hire Christians.
In fact, the strict observance of the decision prohibiting Christians from
working on Jewish lands was too difficult to put into practice.123
During these same years, to respond to the rapid development of the sect of
the soubbotniki124 in the provinces of Voronezh, Samara, Tula, and others,
measures were taken for the Pale of Settlement to be more severely respected.
Thus, in 1821, Jews accused of heavily exploiting the peasants and Cossacks
116 P. I. Pestel, Rousskaa pravda (Russian Truth), Saint Petersburg, 1906, chap. 2, 14, pp.
50-52.
117 Ibidem*, t. 11, p. 493.
118 Ibidem*, 1.1, p. 804.
119 Ibidem*, 1.11, p. 493.
120 Ibidem*, t. 1, p. 804.
121 Ibidem, t. 11, p. 493.
122 Hessen*. t. 1, pp. 206-207.
123 JE, t. 11, p. 493.
124 Sabbatarians: sect whose existence is attested from the late seventeenth century, which was
characterised by pronounced Judaising tendencies.
were expelled from the rural areas of the Chernigov province and in 1822 from
the villages of Poltava province.125
In 1824, during his journey in the Ural Mountains, Alexander I noticed that
a large number of Jews in factories, by clandestinely buying quantities of
precious metals, bribed the inhabitants to the detriment of the Treasury and the
manufacturers, and ordered that the Jews be no longer tolerated in the private
or public factories of the mining industry.126
The Treasury also suffered from smuggling all along the western frontier of
Russia, goods and commodities being transported and sold in both capitals
without passing through customs. The governors reported that smuggling was
mainly practised by Jews, particularly numerous in the border area. In 1816, the
order was given to expel all the Jews from a strip sixty kilometres wide from
the frontier and that it be done in the space of three weeks. The expulsion lasted
five years, was only partial and, as early as 1821, the new government
authorised the Jews to return to their former place of residence. In 1825 a more
comprehensive but much more moderate decision was taken: The only Jews
liable to deportation were those not attached to the local Kehalim or who did
not have property in the border area.127 In other words, it was proposed to expel
only intruders. Moreover, this measure was not systematically applied.

The Regulation of 1804 and its article stipulating the expulsion of the Jews
from the villages of the western provinces naturally posed a serious problem to
the government: where were they to be transferred? Towns and villages were
densely populated, and this density was accentuated by the competition
prevailing in small businesses, given the very low development of productive
labour. However, in southern Ukraine stretched New Russia, vast, fertile, and
sparsely populated.
Obviously, the interest of the state was to incite the mass of non-productive
Jews expelled from the villages to go work the land in New Russia. Ten years
earlier, Catherine had tried to ensure the success of this incentive by striking the
Jews with a double royalty, while totally exempting those who would accept to
be grafted to New Russia. But this double taxation (Jewish historians mention it
often) was not real, as the Jewish population was not censused, and only the
Kahal knew the manpower, while concealing the numbers to the authorities in a
proportion that possibly reached a good half. (As early as 1808, the royalty
ceased to be demanded, and the exemption granted by Catherine no longer
encouraged any Jews to migrate).
This time, and for Jews alone, more than 30,000 hectares of hereditary (but
non-private) land was allocated in New Russia, with 40 hectares of State land

125 PJE, t. 7, p. 313; Kovalevski, in Schit [The Butcher], p. 17.

126 JE, 1.1, p. 805.
127 JE, t. 12, p. 599.
per family (in Russia the average lot of the peasants was a few hectares, rarely
more than ten), cash loans for the transfer and settlement (purchase of livestock,
equipment, etc, which had to be repaid after a period of six years, within the
following ten years); the prior construction of an izba log house was offered to
the settlers (in this region, not only the peasants but even some owners lived in
mud houses), to exempt them of royalties for ten years with maintenance of
individual freedom (in these times of serfdom) and the protection of the
authorities.128 (The 1804 Regulations having exempted Jews from military
service, the cash compensation was included in the royalty fee.)
The enlightened Jews, few at the time (Notkine, Levinson), supported the
governmental initiativebut this result must be achieved through incentives,
in no way coerciveand understood very well the need for their people to
move on to productive work.
The eighty years of the difficult saga of Jewish agriculture in Russia are
described in the voluminous and meticulous work of the Jew V. N. Nikitin (as a
child, he had been entrusted to the cantonists, where he had received his name),
who devoted many years to the study of the archives of the enormous
unpublished official correspondence between St. Petersburg and New Russia.
An abundant presentation interspersed with documents and statistical tables,
with tireless repetitions, possible contradictions in the reports made at
sometimes very distant times by inspectors of divergent opinions, all
accompanied by detailed and yet incomplete tablesnone of this has been put
in order, and it offers, for our brief exposition, much too dense material. Let us
try, however, by condensing the citations, to draw a panorama that is
simultaneously broad and clear.
The governments objective, Nikitin admits, in addition to the colonisation
programme of unoccupied lands, was to give the Jews more space than they
had, to accustom them to productive physical labour, to help guard them from
harmful occupations by which, whether they liked it or not, many of them
made the life of the peasant serfs even more difficult than it already was. The
government bearing in mind the improvement of their living conditions,
proposed to them to turn to agriculture; The government did not seek to
attract Jews by promises; on the contrary, it endeavoured that there should be no
more than three hundred families transferred each year129; it deferred the
transfer so long as the houses were not built on the spot, and invited the Jews,
meanwhile, to send some of their men as scouts. Initially, the idea was not bad,
but it had not sufficiently taken into account the mentality of the Jewish settlers
nor the weak capacities of the Russian administration. The project was doomed
in advance by the fact that the work of the earth is an art that demands
generations to learn: one cannot attach successfully to the earth people who do
not wish it or who are indifferent to it.

128 Nikitin, pp. 6-7.

129 Ibidem, pp. 7, 58, 154.
 The 30,000 hectares allocated to Jews in New Russia remained inalienable
for decades. A posteriori, the journalist I.G. Orchansky considered that Jewish
agriculture could have been a success, but only if Jews had been transferred to
the nearby Crown lands of Belarus where the peasant way of life was under
their control, before their eyes.130 Unfortunately, there was scarcely any land
there (for example, in the province of Grodno there were only 200 hectares,
marginal and infertile lands where the entire population suffered from poor
harvests.131 At first there were only three dozen families willing to emigrate.
The Jews hoped that the expulsion measures from the western provinces would
be reported; it had been foreseen in 1804 that its application would extend on
three years, but it was slow to begin. The fateful deadline of January 1st, 1808
approaching, they began to leave the villages under escort; from 1806 onwards,
there was also a movement in favour of emigration among the Jews, the more
so as the rumour indicated the advantages which were connected with it. The
demands for emigration then flooded en masse: They rushed there as it were
the Promised Land ; like their ancestors who left Chaldea in Canaan, entire
groups left surreptitiously, without authorisation, and some even without a
passport. Some resold the passport they had obtained from other departing
groups, and then demanded that they be replaced under the pretext that they had
lost it. The candidates for departure were day by day more numerous, and all
insistently demanded land, housing and subsistence.132
The influx exceeded the possibilities of reception of the Support Office of
the Jews created in the province of Kherson: time was lacking to build houses,
dig wells, and the organisation suffered from the great distances in this region of
the steppes, the lack of craftsmen, doctors, and veterinarians. The government
was indiscriminate of the money, the good provisions, and sympathy towards
the migrants, but the Governor Richelieu demanded in 1807 that the entrances
be limited to 200, 300 families per year, while receiving without limitation
those who wished to settle on their own account. In case of a bad harvest, all
these people will have to be fed for several years in a row. (The poorest settlers
were paid daily allowances.) However, the governors of the provinces allowed
those over-quota who wished to leavewithout knowing the exact number of
those who were leaving; hence many vicissitudes along the way, due to misery,
sickness, death.133 Some quite simply disappeared during the trip.
Distances across the steppe (between one hundred and three hundred
kilometres between a colony and the Office), the inability of the administration
to keep an accurate count and establish a fair distribution, meant that some of
the migrants were more helped than others; some complained that they did not
receive any compensation or loans. The colony inspectors, too few in numbers,
did not have time to take a closer look (they received a miserable wage, had no
130 I. Orchansky, Evrei v Rossii (Jews in Russia), Essays and Studies, fasc. 1, Saint Petersburg,
1872, pp. 174-175.
131 Nikitin, pp. 3, 128.
132 Ibidem*, pp. 7, 13, 16, 19, 58.
133 Ibidem*, pp. 14, 15, 17, 19, 24, 50.
horses, and walked on foot). After a period of two years of stay, some settlers
still had no farm, no seeds, nor bread. The poorest were allowed to leave
wherever they pleased, and those who renounced their condition as farmers
recovered their former status as bourgeois. But only a fifth of them returned to
their country of origin, and the others wandered (the loans granted to those who
had been scratched off the list of settlers were to be considered definitively
lost). Some reappeared for a time in the colonies, others disappeared without
looking back or leaving a trace, the others pounded the pavement in the
neighbouring towns by trading, according to their old habit.134
The many reports of the Office and inspectors provide insight into how the
new settlers were operating. To train the settlers who did not know where to
start or how to finish, the services of peasants of the Crown were requested; the
first ploughing is done for the most part through hired Russians. The habit is
taken of correcting defects by a hired labour. They sow only a negligible
portion of the plot allocated to them, and use poor-quality seeds; one has
received specific seeds but does not plough or sow; another, when sowing, loses
a lot of seeds, and same goes during harvest. Due to lack of experience, they
break tools, or simply resell them. They do not know how to keep the livestock.
They kill cattle for food, then complain that they no longer have any; they sell
cattle to buy cereals; they do not make provision for dried dung, so their izbas,
insufficiently heated, become damp; they do not fix their houses, so they fall
apart; they do not cultivate vegetable gardens; they heat the houses with straw
stored to feed the cattle. Not knowing how to harvest, neither to mow nor to
thresh, the colonists cannot be hired in the neighbouring hamlets: no one wants
them. They do not maintain the good hygiene of their homes, which favours
diseases. They absolutely did not expect to be personally occupied with
agricultural labour, doubtlessly they thought that the cultivation of the land
would be assured by other hands; that once in possession of great herds, they
would go and sell them at the fairs. The settlers hope to continue receiving
public aid. They complain of being reduced to a pitiable condition, and it is
really so; of having worn their clothes up to the rope, and that is the case; but
the inspection administration replies: If they have no more clothes, it is out of
idleness, for they do not raise sheep, and sow neither linen nor hemp, and their
wives neither spin nor weave. Of course, an inspector concluded in his report,
if the Jews cannot handle their operations, it is by habit of a relaxed life,
because of their reluctance to engage in agricultural work and their
inexperience, but he thought it fair to add: agriculture must be prepared from
earliest youth, and the Jews, having lived indolently until 45 to 50 years, are not
in a position of transforming themselves into farmers in such a short time. 135
The Treasury was obliged to spend two to three times more on the settlers than
expected, and extensions kept on being demanded. Richelieu maintained that
the complaints come from the lazy Jews, not from the good farmers;

134 Ibidem, pp. 26, 28, 41, 43-44, 47, 50, 52, 62-63, 142.
135 Ibidem*, p. 72.
However, another report notes that unluckily for them, since their arrival, they
have never been comforted by an even remotely substantial harvest.136
In response to the many fragments communicated to St. Petersburg to
signal how the Jews deliberately renounced all agricultural work, the ministry
responded in the following way: The government has given them public aid in
the hope that they will become farmers not only in name, but in fact. Many
immigrants are at risk, if not incited to work, to remain debtors to the state for a
long time.137 The arrival of Jewish settlers in New Russia at the expense of the
state, uncontrolled and ill-supported by an equipment programme, was
suspended in 1810. In 1811 the Senate gave the Jews the right to lease the
production of alcohol in the localities belonging to the Crown, but within the
limits of the Pale of Settlement. As soon as the news was known in New Russia,
the will to remain in agriculture was shaken for many settlers: although they
were forbidden to leave the country, some left without any identity papers to
become innkeepers in villages dependent on the Crown, as well as in those
belonging to landowners. In 1812, it appeared that of the 848 families settled
there were in fact only 538; 88 were considered to be on leave (parties earning
their living in Kherson, Nikolayev, Odessa, or even Poland); as for the others,
they had simply disappeared. This entire programmethe authoritative
installation of families on landwas something unprecedented not only in
Russia but in the whole of Europe.138
The Government now considered that in view of the Jews now proven
disgust for the work of the land, seeing that they do not know how to go about
it, given the negligence of the inspectors, it appears that the migration has
given rise to major disturbances; therefore the Jews should be judged
indulgently. On the other hand, how can we guarantee the repayment of
public loans by those who will be allowed to leave their status as farmers, how
to palliate, without injuring the Treasury, the inadequacies of those who will
remain to cultivate the land, how to alleviate the fate of those people who
endured so many misfortunes and are living on the edge? 139 As for the
inspectors, they suffered not only from understaffing, a lack of means, and
various other shortcomings, but also from their negligence, absenteeism, and
delays in the delivery of grain and funds; they saw with indifference the Jews
selling their property; there were also abuses: in exchange of payment, they
granted permits for long-term absences, including for the most reliable workers
in a family, which could quickly lead to the ruin of the farm.
Even after 1810-1812, the situation of the Jewish colonies showed no sign
of improvement: tools lost, broken, or mortgaged by the Jews; Oxen, again,
slaughtered, stolen, or resold; Fields sown too late while awaiting warmth;
use of bad seeds and in too close proximity to houses, always on the one and

136 Ibidem, pp. 24, 37-40, 47-50, 61, 65, 72-73, 93.
137 Ibidem, pp. 29, 37-38.
138 Ibidem, pp. 29, 49, 67, 73, 89, 189.
139 Ibidem*, pp. 87-88.
same plot; no groundwork, sowing for five consecutive years on fields that had
only been ploughed once, without alternating the sowing of wheat and
potatoes; insufficient harvest from one year to another, yet again, without
harvesting seeds. (But the bad harvests also benefit the immigrants: they are
then entitled to time off.) Livestock left uncared for, oxen given for hire or
assigned as carriages they wore them down, did not nourish them, bartered
or slaughtered them to feed themselves, only to say later that they had died of
disease. The authorities either provided them with others or let them leave in
search of a livelihood. They did not care to build safe pens to prevent livestock
from being stolen during the night; they themselves spent their nights sound
asleep; for shepherds, they took children or idlers who did not care for the
integrity of the herds; on feast days or on Saturdays, they left them out to graze
without any supervision (moreover, on Saturday, it is forbidden to catch the
thieves!). They resented their rare co-religionists, who, with the sweat of their
brow, obtained remarkable harvests. The latter incurred the Old Testament
curse, the Herem, for if they show the authorities that the Jews are capable of
working the land, they will eventually force them to do so. Few were
assiduous in working the land they had the intent, while pretending to work,
to prove to the authorities, by their continual needs, their overall incapacity.
They wanted first and foremost to return to the trade of alcohol, which was re-
authorised to their co-religionists. Livestock, instruments, seeds, were supplied
to them several times, and new loans for their subsistence were relentlessly
granted to them. Many, after receiving a loan to establish themselves, came to
the colonies only at the time of the distribution of funds, only to leave again
with this money to neighbouring towns and localities, in search for other work;
they resold the plot that had been allocated to them, roamed, lived several
months in Russian agglomerations at the most intense moments of agricultural
labour, and earned their living by deceiving the peasants. The inspectors
tables show that half of the families were absent with or without authorisation,
and that some had disappeared forever. (An example was the disorder prevailing
in the village of Izrae-levka in the province of Kherson, where the inhabitants,
who had come to their own account, considered themselves entitled to practice
other trades: they were there only to take advantage of the privileges; only 13 of
the 32 families were permanent residents, and again they only sowed to make it
seem legitimate, while the others worked as tavern-keepers in neighbouring
districts.140
The numerous reports of the inspectors note in particular and on several
occasions that the disgust of Jewish women for agriculture was a major
impediment to the success of the settlers. The Jewish women who seemed to
have put themselves to work in the fields subsequently diverted from it. At the
occasion of marriages, the parents of Jewish women agreed with their future
sons-in-law for them not to compel their wives to carry out difficult agricultural
labour, but rather hire workers; They agreed to prepare ornaments, fox and
140 Ibidem*, pp. 64, 78-81, 85, 92-97, 112, 116-117, 142-145.
hare furs, bracelets, head-dresses, and even pearls, for days of celebrations.
These conditions led young men to satisfy the whims of their wives to the
point of ruining their farming; they go so far as to indulge in possessing
luxurious effects, silks, objects of silver or gold, while other immigrants do not
even have clothing for the wintertime. Excessively early marriages make the
Jews multiply significantly faster than the other inhabitants. Then, by the
exodus of the young, the families become too little provided for and are
incapable of ensuring the work. The overcrowding of several families in houses
too scarce generates uncleanliness and favours scurvy. (Some women take
bourgeois husbands and then leave colonies forever.141)
Judging from the reports of the Control Office, the Jews of the various
colonies continually complained about the land of the steppes, so hard it must
be ploughed with four pairs of oxen. Complaints included bad harvests, water
scarcity, lack of fuel, bad weather, disease generation, hail, grasshoppers. They
also complained about the inspectors, but unduly, seeing that upon examination
the complaints were deemed unfounded. Immigrants complain shamelessly of
their slightest annoyances, They ceaselessly increase their demandswhen
it is justified, they are provided for via the Office. On the other hand, they had
little reason to complain about limitations to the exercise of their piety or of the
number of schools open in the agglomerations (in 1829, for eight colonies, there
were forty teachers142).
However, as pointed out by Nikitin, in the same steppe, during the same
period, in the same virgin lands, threatened by the same locusts, cultivations by
German colonists, Mennonites, and Bulgarians had been established. They also
suffered from the same bad harvests, the same diseases, but however, most of
them always had enough bread and livestock, and they lived in beautiful houses
with outbuildings, their vegetable gardens were abundant, and their dwellings
surrounded by greenery. (The difference was obvious, especially when the
German settlers, at the request of the authorities, came to live in the Jewish
settlements to convey their experience and set an example: even from a
distance, their properties could be distinguished.)
In the Russian colonies the houses were also better than those of the Jews.
(However, Russians had managed to get into debt with some Jews who were
richer than them and paid their debts while working in their fields.) The Russian
peasants, Nikitin explains, under the oppression of serfdom, were accustomed
to everything and stoically endured all misfortunes. That is how the Jewish
settlers who had suffered losses following various indignities were assisted by
the vast spaces of the steppe that attracted fugitives serfs from all regions
Chased by sedentary settlers, the latter replied by the looting, the theft of cattle,
the burning of houses; well received, however, they offered their work and
know-how. As reflective and practical men, and by instinct of self-preservation,
the Jewish cultivators preferred receiving these fugitives with kindness and

141 Ibidem, pp. 79, 92, 131, 142, 146-149.

142 Ibidem*, pp. 36, 106, 145.
eagerness; in return, the latter willingly helped them in ploughing, sowing, and
harvesting; Some of them, to hide better, embraced the Jewish religion. These
cases came to light, in 1820 the government forbade Jews to use Christian
labour.143
Meanwhile, in 1817, the ten years during which the Jewish settlers were
exempt from royalties had passed, and they were now to pay, like the peasants
of the Crown. Collective petitions emanating not only from the colonists, but
also from public officials, demanded that the privilege should be extended for a
further fifteen years.
A personal friend of Alexander I, Prince Golitsyn, Minister of Education
and Religious Affairs, also responsible for all problems concerning the Jews,
took the decision to exempt them from paying royalties for another five years
and to postpone the full repayment of loans up to thirty years. It is important to
note, on the honour of the authorities of St. Petersburg, that no request of the
Jews, before and now, has ever been ignored.144
Among the demands of the Jewish settlers, Nikitin found one which
seemed to him to be particularly characteristic: Experience has proven, in as
much as agriculture is indispensable to humanity, it is considered the most basic
of occupations, which demands more physical exertion than ingenuity and
intelligence; and, all over the world, those affected to this occupation are those
incapable of more serious professions, such as industrialists and merchants; it is
the latter category, inasmuch as it demands more talent and education, which
contributes more than all others the prosperity of nations, and in all periods it
has been accorded far more esteem and respect than that of agricultors. The
slanderous representations of the Jews to the government resulted in depriving
the Jews of the freedom to exercise their favourite tradethat of commerce
and to force them to change their status by becoming farmers, the so-called
plebs. Between 1807 and 1809, more than 120,000 people were driven out of
villages [where most lived on the alcohol trade], and were forced to settle in
uninhabited places. Hence their claim to: return to them the status of
bourgeois with the right, attested in the passport, to be able to leave without
hindrances, according to the wishes of each individual. 145 These are well-
weighed and unambiguous formulas. From 1814 to 1823, the farming of Jews
did not prosper. The statistical tables show that each registered individual
cultivated less than two-thirds of a hectare. As they tried to cut off the harshest
work (in the eyes of the inspectors), they found compensation in commerce
and other miscellaneous trades.146
Half a century later, the Jewish journalist I.G. Orchansky proposed the
following interpretation: What could be more natural for the Jews transplanted
here to devote themselves to agriculture to have seen a vast field of virgin

143 Ibidem, pp. 13, 95, 109, 144, 505.

144 Ibidem, pp. 99-102, 105, 146.
145 Ibidem, pp. 99-102, 105, 146.
146 Ibidem*, pp. 103-104.
economic activity, and to have precipitated themselves there with their
customary and favourite occupations, which promised in the towns a harvest
more abundant than that which they could expect as farmers. Why, then,
demand of them that they should necessarily occupy themselves with
agricultural labour, which undoubtedly, would not turn out well for them,
considering the bubbling activity that attracts the Jews in the cities in
formation.147
The Russian authorities at that time saw things differently: in time, the
Jews could become useful cultivators, if they resumed their status as
bourgeois, they would only increase the number of parasites in the cities. 148 On
record: 300,000 rubles spent on nine Jewish settlements, a colossal sum
considering the value of the currency at the time.
In 1822 the additional five years of royalty exemption had elapsed, but the
condition of the Jewish farms still required new franchises and new subsidies:
the state of extreme poverty of the settlers was noted, linked to their
inveterate laziness, disease, mortality, crop failures, and ignorance of
agricultural work.149
Nevertheless, the young Jewish generation was gradually gaining
experience in agriculture. Recognising that good regular harvests were not in
the realm of the impossible, the settlers invited their compatriots from Belarus
and Lithuania to join them, all the more since there had been bad harvests there;
the Jewish families flocked en masse, with or without authorisation, as in 1824,
they feared the threat of general expulsion in the western part of the country; In
1821, as we have already mentioned, measures had been taken to put an end to
the Jewish distilleries in the province of Chernigov, followed by two or three
other regions. The governors of the western provinces let all the volunteers go
without much inquiry as to how much land was left in New Russia for the Jews.
From there, it was announced that the possibilities of reception did not
exceed 200 families per year, but 1,800 families had already started the journey
(some strayed in nature, others settled along the way). From then on, the
colonists were refused all state aid (but with ten years exemption of royalties);
however, the Kehalim were interested in getting the poorest to leave in order to
have less royalties to pay, and to a certain extent, they provided those who left
with funds from the community. (They encouraged the departure of the elderly,
the sick, and large families with few able-bodied adults useful to agriculture;
and when the authorities demanded a written agreement from the leavers, they
were provided with a list of signatures devoid of any meaning. 150 Of the 453
families who arrived in the neighbourhood of Ekaterinoslav in 1823, only two
were able to settle at their own expense. What had pushed them there was the
mad hope of receiving public aid, which might have dispensed the newcomers

147 Orchansky, pp. 170, 173-174.

148 Nikitin, p. 114.
149 Ibidem*, p. 135.
150 Ibidem, p. 118.
from work. In 1822, 1,016 families flocked to New Russia from Belarus: the
colonies were rapidly filled with immigrants to whom provisional hospitality
was offered; confinement and uncleanliness engendered diseases.151
Also, in 1825, Alexander I prohibited the relocation of the Jews. In 1824
and 1825, following further bad harvests, the Jews were supported by loans
(but, in order not to give them too much hope, their origin was concealed: they
supposedly came from the personal decision of an inspector, or as a reward for
some work). Passports were again issued so that the Jews could settle in towns.
As for paying royalties, even for those settled there for eighteen years, it was no
longer discussed.152

At the same time, in 1823, a decree of His Majesty orders that in the
provinces of Byelorussia the Jews shall cease all their distillery activities in
1824, abandon farmhouses and relay stations and settle permanently in the
towns and agglomerations. The transfer was implemented. By January 1824,
some 20,000 people had already been displaced. The Emperor demanded to see
to it that the Jews were provided with activities and subsistence during this
displacement, so that, without home base, they would not suffer, under these
conditions, of more pressing needs such as that of food. 153 The creation of a
committee composed of four ministers (the fourth ministerial cabinet created
for Jewish affairs) produced no tangible results either in terms of funding, nor in
administrative capacities, nor in the social structure of the Jewish community,
which was impossible to rebuild from the outside.
In this, as before in many other domains, the emperor Alexander I appears
to us to be weak-willed in his impulses, inconstant and inconsistent with his
resolves (as we can see him passive in the face of strengthening secret societies
which were preparing to overthrow the throne). But in no case should his
decisions be attributed to a lack of respect for the Jews. On the contrary, he was
listening to their needs and, even during the war of 1812-14, he had kept at
Headquarters the Jewish delegates Zindel Sonnenberg and Leisen Dillon who
defended the interests of the Jews. (Dillon, it is true, was soon to be judged
for having appropriated 250,000 rubles of public money and for having extorted
funds from landowners.) Sonnenberg, on the other hand, remained for a long
time one of Alexanders close friends. On the orders of the Tsar, (1814) a
permanent Jewish deputation functioned for a number of years in St. Petersburg,
for which the Jews had themselves raised funds, for there were plans for major
secret expenditures within government departments. These deputies demanded
that throughout Russia, the Jews should have the right to engage in the trade,
farming, and distillation of spirits, that they be granted privileges in matters

151 Ibidem*, pp. 110, 120-129, 132, 144, 471.

152 Ibidem, pp. 138, 156.
153 Hessen, 1.1. pp. 205-206.
of taxation, that the backlogs be handed over, that the number of Jews
admitted to be members of the magistrate no longer be limited. The Emperor
benevolently listened to them, made promises, but no concrete measures were
taken.154
In 1817 the English Missionary Society sent the lawyer Louis Weil, an
equal rights activist for the Jews, to Russia for the specific purpose of
acquainting himself with the situation of the Jews of Russia: he had an
interview with Alexander I to whom he handed a note. Deeply convinced that
the Jews represented a sovereign nation, Weil affirmed that all Christian
peoples, since they had received salvation of the Jews, were to render to them
the highest homage and to show them their gratitude by benefits. In this last
period of his life, marked by mystical dispositions, Alexander had to be
sensitive to such arguments. Both he and his government were afraid of
touching with an imprudent hand the religious rules of the Jews. Alexander
had great respect for the venerable people of the Old Covenant and was
sympathetic to their present situation. Hence his utopian quest to make this
people access the New Testament. To this end, in 1817, with the help of the
Emperor, the Society of Christians of Israel was created, meaning Jews who
converted to Christianity (not necessarily orthodoxy), and because of this
enjoyed considerable privileges: they had the right, everywhere in Russia, to
trade and to carry on various trades without belonging to guilds or workshops,
and they were freed, they and their descendants, forever, of any civil and
military service. Nevertheless, this society experienced no influx of converted
Jews and soon ceased to exist.155
The good dispositions of Alexander I in regards to the Jews made him
express his conviction to put an end to the accusations of ritual murders which
arose against them. (These accusations were unknown in Russia until the
division of Poland, from where they came. In Poland they appeared in the
sixteenth century, transmitted from Europe where they were born in England in
1144 before resurfacing in the twelfth-thirteenth century in Spain, France,
Germany, and Great Britain. Popes and Monarchs fought off these accusations
without them disappearing in the fourteenth nor fifteenth century. The first trial
in Russia took place in Senno, near Vitebsk, in 1816, was not only stopped by
Her Majestys decision, but incited the Minister of Religious Affairs, Golitsyn,
to send the authorities of all provinces the following injunction: henceforth, not
to accuse the Jews of having put to death Christian children, solely supported
by prejudices and without proof.156 In 1822-1823 another affair of this kind
broke out in Velije, also in the province of Vitebsk. However, the court decreed
in 1824: The Jews accused in many uncertain Christian testimonies of having

154 Ibidem, pp. 176-181; JE, t. 7, pp. 103-104.

155 Hessen, 1.1, pp. 180, 192-194.
156 PJE, t. 4, pp. 582-586; Hessen, 1.1, p 183.
killed this boy, supposedly to collect his blood, must be exonerated of all
suspicion.157
Nevertheless, in the twenty-five years of his reign, Alexander I did not
sufficiently study the question to conceive and put into practice a methodical
solution satisfactory to all, regarding the Jewish problem as it was in Russia at
the time.
How to act, what to do with this separated people who has not yet grafted
onto Russia, and which continues to grow in number, is also the question to
which the Decembrist Pestel who opposed the Emperor, sought an answer for
the Russia of the future, which he proposed to direct. In The Truth of Russia he
proposed two solutions. Either make the Jews merge for good in the Christian
population of Russia: Above all, it is necessary to deflect the effect, harmful to
Christians, of the close link that unites the Jews amongst themselves or which is
directed against Christians, which completely isolates the Jews from all other
citizens Convene the most knowledgeable rabbis and Jewish personalities,
listen to their proposals and then take action If Russia does not expel the
Jews, all the more they shouldnt adopt unfriendly attitudes towards Christians.
The second solution would consist in helping the Jews create a separate state
in one of the regions of Asia Minor. To this end, it is necessary to establish a
gathering point for the Jewish people and to send several armies to support it
(we are not very far from the future Zionist idea). The Russian and Polish Jews
together will form a people of more than two million souls. Such a mass of
men in search of a country will have no difficulty in overcoming obstacles such
as the opposition of the Turks. Crossing Turkey from Europe, they will pass into
Asiatic Turkey and occupy there enough place and land to create a specifically
Jewish state. However, Pestel acknowledges that such an enormous
undertaking requires special circumstances and an entrepreneurial spirit of
genius.158
Nikita Muravyov, another Decembrist, stipulated in his proposed
Constitution that Jews can enjoy civil rights in the places where they live, but
that the freedom to settle in other places will depend on the particular decisions
of the Peoples Supreme Assembly.159
Nevertheless, the instances proper to the Jewish population, the Kehalim,
opposed with all their might the interference of state power and all external
influence. On this subject, opinions differ. From the religious point of view, as
many Jewish writers explain, living in the diaspora is a historical punishment
that weighs on Israel for its former sins. Scattering must be assumed to merit
Gods forgiveness and the return to Palestine. For this it is necessary to live
without failing according to the Law and not to mingle with the surrounding
peoples: that is the ordeal. But for a liberal Jewish historian of the early
twentieth century, the dominant class, incapable of any creative work, deaf to

157 Hessen*, t. 1, pp. 211-212.

158 Pestel, pp. 52-53.
159 Hessen*, t. 2, p. 18.
the influences of its time, devoted all its energies to preserving from the attacks
of time, both external and internal, a petrified national and religious life. The
Kahal drastically stifled the protests of the weakest. The cultural and
educational reform of 1804 confined itself to illusorily blurring the distinctive
and foreign character of the Jews, without having recourse to coercion, or even
taking mercy on prejudices; these decisions sowed a great disturbance within
the Kahal in that they harboured a threat to the power it exercised over the
population; in the Regulation, the most sensitive point for the Kahal was the
prohibition of delivering the unruly to the Herem, or, even more severe, the
observation that to keep the population in servile submission to a social order,
as it had been for centuries, it was forbidden to change garb. 160 But it can not
be denied that the Kehalim also had reasonable regulative requirements for the
life of the Jews, such as the Khasaki rule allowing or forbidding the members of
the community from taking on a particular type of farming or occupation, which
put an end to excessive competition between Jews. 161 Thou shalt not move the
bounds of thy neighbour (Deuteronomy, XIX, 14).
In 1808, an unidentified Jew transmitted an anonymous note (fearing
reprisals from the Kahal) to the Minister of Internal Affairs, entitled Some
remarks concerning the management of the life of the Jews. He wrote: Many
do not regard as sacred the innumerable rites and rules which divert attention
from all that is useful, enslave the people to prejudices, take by their
multiplication an enormous amount of time, and deprive the Jews of the
advantage of being good citizens. He noted that the rabbis, pursuing only
their interest, have enclosed life in an intertwining of rules, have concentrated
in their hands all the police, legal, and spiritual authority; more precisely, the
study of the Talmud and the observance of rites as a unique means of
distinguishing oneself and acquiring affluence have become the first dream and
aspiration of the Jews; And although the governmental Regulation limits the
prerogatives of the rabbis and Kelahim, the spirit of the people remained the
same. The author of this note considered the rabbis and the Kahal as the main
culprits of the ignorance and misery of the people.162
Another Jewish public man, Guiller Markevich, a native of Prussia, wrote
that the members of the Vilnius Kahal, with the help of the local administration,
exerted a severe repression against all those who denounced their illegal acts;
now deprived of the right to the Herem, they kept their accusers for long years
in prison, and if one of them succeeded in getting a message from his cell to the
higher authorities, they sent him without any other form of trials to the next
world. When this kind of crime was revealed, the Kahal spent large sums to
stifle the affair.163 Other Jewish historians give examples of assassinations
directly commissioned by the Jewish Kahal.

160 Hessen, I. 1. pp. 169-170.

161 Ibidem, p. 51; JE, t. 14, p. 491.
162 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 171-173.
163 Hessen*, t. 2, pp. 11-13.
 In their opposition to governmental measures, the Kehalim relied
essentially on the religious sense of their action; thus the union of the Kahal
and the rabbis, desirous of maintaining their power over the masses, made the
government believe that every act of a Jew was subject to such and such a
religious prescription; the role of religion was thereby increased. As a result, the
people of the administration saw in the Jews not members of different social
groups, but a single entity closely knit together; the vices and infractions of the
Jews were explained not by individual motives, but by the alleged land
amorality of the Jewish religion.164
The union of Kehalim and rabbis did not want to see or hear anything. It
extended its leaden cover over the masses. The power of the Kahal only
increased while the rights of the elders and rabbis were limited by the
Regulation of 1804. This loss is offset by the fact that the Kahal acquiredit
is true, only in a certain measurethe role of a representative administration
which it had enjoyed in Poland. The Kahal owed this strengthening of its
authority to the institution of deputies. This deputation of the Jewish
communities established in the western provinces, in charge of debating at
leisure with the government the problems of Jewish life, was elected in 1807
and sat intermittently for eighteen years. These deputies endeavoured, above all,
to restore to the rabbis the right to the Herem; They declared that to deprive the
rabbis of the right to chastise the disobedient is contrary to the religious respect
which the Jews are obliged by law to have for the rabbis. These deputies
succeeded in persuading the members of the Committee (of Senator Popov,
1809) that the authority of the rabbis was a support for the Russian
governmental power. The members of the Committee did not resist in front of
the threat that the Jews would escape the authority of the rabbis to delve into
depravity; the Committee was prepared to maintain in its integrity all this
archaic structure to avoid the terrible consequences evoked by the deputies Its
members did not seek to know who the deputies considered to be violators of
the spiritual law; they did not suspect that they were those who aspired to
education; the deputies exerted all their efforts to strengthen the authority of
the Kahal and to dry at the source the movement towards culture. 165 They
succeeded in deferring the limitations previously taken to the wearing of
traditional Jewish garb, which dated back to the Middle Ages and so blatantly
separated the Jews from the surrounding world. Even in Riga, the law that
ordered the Jews to wear another garment was not applied anywhere, and it
was reported by the Emperor himselfwhile awaiting new legislation166
All requests of the deputies were not satisfied, far from it. They needed
money and to get it, the deputies frightened their communities by ominously
announcing the intentions of the government and by amplifying the rumours of
the capital. In 1820, Markevitch accused the deputies of intentionally

164 Ibidem, t. 1, p. 195.

165 Ibidem, pp. 173-175.
166 Ibidem*, pp. 191-192.
spreading false news to force the population to pay to the Kahal the sums
demanded.167
In 1825, the institution of the Jewish deputies was suppressed.
One of the sources of tension between the authorities and Kehalim resided
in the fact that the latter, the only ones authorised to levy the capitation on the
Jewish population, hid the souls during the censuses and concealed a large
quantity of them. The government thought that it knew the exact numbers of
the Jewish population in order to demand the corresponding amount of the
capitation, but it was very difficult to establish it. 168 For example, in Berdichev,
the unrecorded Jewish population regularly accounted for nearly half the
actual number of Jewish inhabitants.169 (According to the official data that the
Government had succeeded in establishing for 1818, the Jews were 677,000, an
already important number, for example, by comparison with the data of 1812,
the number of male individuals had suddenly doubledbut it was still an
undervalued figure, for there were about 40,000 Jews from the kingdom of
Poland to add.) Even with reduced figures of the Kehalim, there were
unrecovered taxes every year; and not only were they not recuperated but they
augmented from year to year. Alexander I personally told the Jewish
representatives of his discontent at seeing so many concealments and arrears
(not to mention the smuggling industry). In 1817 the remission of all fines and
surcharges, penalties, and arrears was decreed, and a pardon was granted to all
those who had been punished for not correctly recording souls, but on the
condition that the Kehalim provide honest data from then on.170 But no
improvement ensued. In 1820, the Minister of Finance announced that all
measures aimed at improving the economic situation of the Jews were
unsuccessful Many Jews were wandering without identity papers; a new
census reported a number of souls two to three times greater (if not more) than
those previously provided by Jewish societies.171
However, the Jewish population was constantly increasing. Most
researchers see one of the main reasons for this growth as being the custom of
early marriages prevalent at that time among the Jews: as early as 13 years old
for boys, and from 12 years old onwards for girls. In the anonymous note of
1808 quoted above, the unknown Jewish author writes that this custom of early
unions is at the root of innumerable evils and prevents the Jews from getting
rid of inveterate customs and activities that draw upon them the general
publics indignation, and harms them as well as others. Tradition among the
Jews is that those who are not married at a young age are held in contempt and
even the most destitute draw on their last resources to marry their children as
soon as possible, even though these newlyweds incur the vicissitudes of a
miserable existence. Early marriages were introduced by the rabbis who took
167 Ibidem, p. 209.
168 Ibidem, p. 178.
169 Orchansky, p. 32.
170 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 178-179, 184, 186.
171 Ibidem, I. 2, pp. 62-63.
advantage of them. And one will be better able to contract a profitable marriage
by devoting himself to the study of the Talmud and the strict observance of the
rites. Those who married early were indeed only occupied with studying the
Talmud, and when finally came the time to lead an autonomous existence, these
fathers, ill-prepared for labour, ignorant of the working life, turn to the
manufacture of alcohol and petty trading. The same goes for crafts: By
marrying, the fifteen-year-old apprentice no longer learns his trade, but becomes
his own boss and only ruins the work. 172 In the mid-1920s, in the provinces of
Grodno and Vilnius, there was a rumour that it would be forbidden to enter into
marriage before reaching the age of majority, which is why there was a hasty
conclusion of marriages between children who were little more than 9 years
old.173
These early marriages debilitated the life of the Jews. How could such a
swarming, such a densification of the population, such competition in similar
occupations, lead to any thing else than misery? The policy of the Kehalim
contributed to the worsening of the material conditions of the Jews.174
Menashe Ilier, a distinguished Talmudist but also a supporter of the
rationalism of the age of Enlightenment, published in 1807 a book, which he
sent to the rabbis (it was quickly withdrawn from circulation by the rabbinate,
and his second book was to be destined to a massive book burning). He
addressed the dark aspects of Jewish life. He stated: Misery is inhumanly
great, but can it be otherwise when the Jews have more mouths to feed than
hands to work? It is important to make the masses understand that it is
necessary to earn a living by the sweat of their brow Young people, who have
no income, contract marriage by counting on the mercy of God and on the purse
of their father, and when this support is lacking, laden with family, they throw
themselves on the first occupation come, even if it is dishonest. In droves they
devote themselves to commerce, but as the latter cannot feed them all, they are
obliged to resort to deceit. This is why it is desirable that the Jews turn to
agriculture. An army of idlers, under the appearance of educated people, live
by charity and at the expense of the community. No one cures the people: the
rich only think of enriching themselves, the rabbis think only of the disputes
between Hassidim and Minagdes (Jewish Orthodox), and the only concern of
the Jewish activists is to short-circuit the misfortune presented in the form of
governmental decrees, even if they contribute to the good of the people.175
Thus the great majority of the Jews in Russia lived on small trade, crafts,
and small industries, or served as intermediaries; they have inundated the
cities of factories and retail shops.176 How could the economic life of the
Jewish people be healthy under these conditions?

172 Ibidem*, t. 1, pp. 171-172.

173 Ibidem, t. 2, p. 56.
174 Ibidem, t. 1, p. 210.
175 Ibidem, pp. 170171; JE, t. 10, pp. 855-857.
176 Hessen, t. 1, pp. 190, 208.
 However, a much later Jewish author of the mid-twentieth century was able
to write, recalling this time: It is true that the Jewish mass lived cheaply and
poorly. But the Jewish community as a whole was not miserable.177
There is no lack of interest in the rather unexpected testimonies of the life
of the Jews in the western provinces, seen by the participants in the Napoleonic
expedition of 1812 who passed through this region. On the outskirts of
Dochitsa, the Jews are rich and wealthy, they trade intensively with Russian
Poland and even go to the Leipzig fair. At Gloubokie, the Jews had the right
to distil alcohol and make vodka and mead, they established or owned
cabarets, inns, and relays located on highways. The Jews of Mogilev are well-
off, undertake large-scale trading (although a terrible misery reigns around that
area). Almost all the Jews in those places had a license to sell spirits.
Financial transactions were largely developed there. Here again is the
testimony of an impartial observer: In Kiev, the Jews are no longer counted.
The general characteristic of Jewish life is ease, although it is not the lot of
all.178
On the level of psychology and everyday life, the Russian Jews have the
following specific traits: a constant concern about their fate, their
identity how to fight, defend themselves cohesion stems from
established customs: the existence of an authoritarian and powerful social
structure charged with preserving the uniqueness of the way of life;
adaptation to new conditions is to a very large extent collective and not
individual.179
We must do justice to this organic unity of land, which in the first half of
the nineteenth century gave the Jewish people of Russia its original aspect.
This world was compact, organic, subject to vexations, not spared of suffering
and deprivation, but it was a world in itself. Man was not stifled within it. In
this world, one could experience joie de vivre, one could find ones food one
could build ones life to ones taste and in ones own way, both materially and
spiritually Central fact: the spiritual dimension of the community was linked
to traditional knowledge and the Hebrew language.180
But in the same book devoted to the Russian Jewish world, another writer
notes that the lack of rights, material misery, and social humiliation hardly
allowed self-respect to develop among the people.181

177 B. C. Dinour, Religiozno-natsionalnyj oblik rousskoo cvrestva (The Religious and National
Physionomy of Russian Jews), in BJWR-1, p. 318.
178 Pozner, in JW-1, pp. 61, 63-64.
179 Dinour, BJWR-1, pp. 61, 63-64.
180 Ibidem, p. 318.
181 J. Mark, Literatoura na idich v Rossii (Yiddish Language Literature in Russia), in BJWR-1,
p. 520.
The picture we have presented of these years is complex, as is almost any
problem related to the Jewish world. Henceforth, throughout our development,
we must not lose sight of this complexity, but must constantly bear it in mind,
without being disturbed by the apparent contradictions between various authors.
Long ago, before being expelled from Spain, the Jews [of Eastern Europe]
marched at the head of other nations; today [in the first half of the seventeenth
century], their cultural impoverishment is total. Deprived of rights, cut off from
the surrounding world, they retreated into themselves. The Renaissance passed
by without concern for them, as did the intellectual movement of the eighteenth
century in Europe. But this Jewish world was strong in itself. Hindered by
countless religious commandments and prohibitions, the Jew not only did not
suffer from them, but rather saw in them the source of infinite joys. In them, the
intellect found satisfaction in the subtle dialectic of the Talmud, the feeling in
the mysticism of the Kabbalah. Even the study of the Bible was sidelined, and
knowledge of grammar was considered almost a crime.182
The strong attraction of the Jews to the Enlightenment began in Prussia
during the second half of the eighteenth century and received the name of
Haskala (Age of Enlightenment). This intellectual awakening translated their
desire to initiate themselves in European culture, to enhance the prestige of
Judaism, which had been humiliated by other peoples. In parallel with the
critical study of the Jewish past, Haskala militants (the Maskilim; the
enlightened, educated) wanted to harmoniously unite Jewish culture with
European knowledge.183 At first, they intended to remain faithful to traditional
Judaism, but in their tracks they began to sacrifice the Jewish tradition and take
the side of assimilation by showing increasing contempt for the language of
their people184 (Yiddish, that is). In Prussia this movement lasted the time of a
generation, but it quickly reached the Slavic provinces of the empire, Bohemia,
and Galicia. In Galicia, supporters of Haskala, who were even more inclined to
assimilation, were already ready to introduce the Enlightenment by force, and
even often enough had recourse to it185 with the help of authorities. The
border between Galicia and the western provinces of Russia was permeable to
individuals as well as to influences. With a delay of a century, the movement
eventually penetrated into Russia.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Russia, the government
endeavoured precisely to overcome Jewish particularism outside of religion
and worship, as a Jewish author euphemistically specifies186, confirming that
this government did not interfere with the religion or religious life of the Jews.
We have already seen that the Regulation of 1804 opened the doors of primary

182 JE, t. 6, p. 92.

183 Ibidem, pp. 191-192.
184 J. Kissine, Rasmychlenia o ousskom evrestve i ego lileraloure (Thoughts on Russian
Judaism and its literature), in Evreskii mir. 2, New York, ed. Of the Jewish Russian Union,
1944, p. 171.
185 JE, t. 6, pp. 192-193.
186 Dinour, LVJR-1, p. 314.
schools, secondary schools, and universities to all Jewish children, without any
limitations or reservations. However,the aim of all the efforts of the Jewish
ruling class was to nip in the bud this educational and cultural reform 187; The
Kahal endeavoured to extinguish the slightest light of the Enlightenment. 188 To
preserve in its integrity the established religious and social order the
rabbinate and Hasidism were endeavouring to eradicate the seedlings of secular
education.189
Thus, the great masses of the Pale of Settlement felt horror and suspicion
for Russian schooling and did not want to hear about it. 190 In 1817, and again
in 1821, in various provinces, there were cases where the Kehalim prevented
Jewish children from learning the Russian language in any school, whichever it
was. The Jewish deputies in St. Petersburg repeated insistently that they did
not consider it necessary to open Jewish schools where languages other than
Hebrew would be taught.191 They recognised only the Heder (elementary school
of Jewish language) and the Yeshiva (graduate school intended to deepen the
knowledge of the Talmud); almost every important community had its
Yeshiva.192
The Jewish body in Russia was thus hindered and could not free itself on
its own.
But the first cultural protagonists also emerged from it, unable to move
things without the help of Russian authorities. In the first place Isaac-Ber
Levinson, a scholar who had lived in Galicia, where he had been in contact with
the militants of Haskala, regarded not only the rabbinate but also the Hasidim
as responsible for many popular misfortunes. Basing himself on the Talmud
itself and on rabbinical literature, he demonstrated in his book Instructions to
Israel that Jews were not forbidden to know foreign languages, especially not
the official language of the country where they lived, if necessary in private as
well as in public life; that knowledge of the secular sciences does not pose a
threat to national and religious sentiment; finally, that the predominance of
commercial occupations is in contradiction with the Torah as with reason, and
that it is important to develop productive work. But to publish his book,
Levinson had to use a subsidy from the Ministry of Education; he himself was
convinced that cultural reform within Judaism could only be achieved with the
support of the higher authorities.193
Later, it was Guesanovsky, a teacher in Warsaw, who, in a note to the
authorities, without relying on the Talmud, but on the contrary, by opposing it,
imputed to the Kahal and the rabbinate the spiritual stagnation which had
petrified the people; he stated that solely the weakening of their power would

187 Hessen, p. 160.

188 Ibidem, p. 160.
189 Ibidem, t. 2, p. 1.
190 M. Troitsky, Evrei v roussko chkole (The Jews in Russian Schools), in LVJR-1, p. 350.
191 Hessen*, t. 1, pp. 188-189.
192 Dinour, LVJR-1, p. 315.
193 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 4-7.
make it possible to introduce secular schooling; that it was necessary to control
the Melamed (primary school teachers) and to admit as teachers only those
deemed pedagogically and morally suitable; that the Kahal had to be dismissed
from the financial administration; and that the age of nuptial contracts had to be
raised. Long before them, in his note to the Minister of Finance, Guiller
Markevitch, already quoted, wrote that in order to save the Jewish people from
spiritual and economic decline, it was necessary to abolish the Kehalim, to teach
the Jews languages, to organise work for them in factories, but also to allow
them to freely engage in commerce throughout the country and use the services
of Christians.
Later, in the 1930s, Litman Feiguine, a Chernigov merchant and a major
supplier, took up most of these arguments with even greater insistence, and
through Benkendorff194 his note ended up in the hands of Nicolas I (Feiguine
benefited from the support of bureaucratic circles). He defended the Talmud but
reproached the Melamed for being the lowest of the incompetents who
taught a theology founded on fanaticism, inculcated in children the contempt
of other disciplines as well as the hatred of the Heterodox. He also considered
it essential to suppress the Kehalim. (Hessen, the sworn enemy of the Kahal
system, affirms that the latter, by its despotism, aroused among the Jews an
obscure resentment.)195
Long, very long, was the path that enabled secular education to penetrate
into Jewish circles. Meanwhile, the only exceptions were in Vilnius, where,
under the influence of relations with Germany, the Maksilim intellectual group
had gained strength, and in Odessa, the new capital of New Russia, home to
many Jews from Galicia (due to the permeability of frontiers), populated by
various nationalities and in the throes of intense commercial activity,hence
the Kahal did not feel itself powerful there. The intelligentsia, on the contrary,
had the feeling of its independence and blended culturally (by the way of
dressing, by all external aspects) in the surrounding population. 196 Even though
the majority of the Odessite Jews were opposed to the establishment of a
general educational establishment197 principally due to the efforts of the local
administration, in the 30s, in Odessa as in Kishinev were created secular
schools of the private type which were successful.198
Then, in the course of the nineteenth century, this breakthrough of the
Russian Jews towards education irresistibly intensified and would have
historical consequences for Russia as for all mankind during the twentieth
century. Thanks to a great effort of will, Russian Judaism managed to free itself
from the state of threatening stagnation in which it found itself and to fully
accede to a rich and diversified life. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
194 Count Alexander Benkendorff (1783-1844), named in 1814 by Nicholas I Commander of
the gendarmes and of the 3rd Section (the intelligence service).
195 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 8-10; JE, 1.15, p. 198.
196 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 2-3.
197 JE, t. 11, p. 713.
198 Troitsky, in BJWR-1, p. 351.
there was a clear discernment of the signs of a revival and development in
Russian Judaism, a movement of high historical significance, which no one had
yet foreseen.
 Chapter 3. During the Reign of Nicholas 1

With regard to the Jews, Nicholas I was very resolute. It was during his reign,
according to sources, that more than half of all legal acts relating to Jews, from
Alexis Mikhailovich to the death of Alexander II199, were published, and the
Emperor personally examined this legislative work to direct it.200
Jewish historiography has judged that his policy was exceptionally cruel
and gloomy. However, the personal interventions of Nicholas I did not
necessarily prejudice the Jews, far from it. For example, one of the first files he
received as an inheritance from Alexander I was the reopening, on the eve of his
death (while on his way to Taganrog), of the Velije affairthe accusation
against the Jews for having perpetrated a ritual murder on the person of a child.
The Jewish Encyclopedia writes that to a large extent, the Jews are indebted to
the verdict of acquittal to the Emperor who sought to know the truth despite the
obstruction on the part of the people he trusted. In another wellknown case,
linked to accusations against the Jews (the assassination of Mstislavl), the
Emperor willingly turned to the truth: after having, in a moment of anger,
inflicted sanctions against the local Jewish population, he did not refuse to
acknowledge his error.201 By signing the verdict of acquittal in the Velije case,
Nicolas wrote that the vagueness of the requisitions had not made it possible to
take another decision, adding nevertheless: I do not have the moral certainty
that Jews could have committed such a crime, or that they could not have done
it. Repeated examples of this kind of assassination, with the same clues, but
always without sufficient evidence, suggest to him that there might be a
fanatical sect among the Jews, but unfortunately, even among us Christians,
there also exists sects just as terrifying and incomprehensible. 202 Nicholas I
and his close collaborators continued to believe that certain Jewish groups
practised ritual murders.203 For several years, the Emperor was under the severe
grip of a calumny that smelled of blood therefore his prejudice that Jewish
199 (18181881), The liberator tsar whose name is associated with the great reforms of the
1860s (abolition of serfdom, justice, the press, zemstvos, etc.) and the rise of the
revolutionary movement; assassinated on March 13, 1881 by a commando of the Will of the
People.
200 JE, t. 11, p. 709.
201 Ibidem, pp. 709710.
202 Hessen, Istoria evreskogo naroda v Rossii (History of the Jewish People in Russia), in 2
vol., t. 2, Leningrad, 1927, p. 27.
203 LJE, t. 7, p. 322.
religious doctrine was supposed to present a danger to the Christian population
was reinforced.204
This danger was understood by Nicolas in the fact that the Jews could
convert Christians to Judaism. Since the eighteenth century, the high profile
conversion to the Judaism of Voznitsyn, a captain of the Imperial army, had
been kept in mind. In Russia, from the second half of the seventeenth century
onwards, groups of Judaisers multiplied. In 1823, the Minister of Internal
Affairs announced in a report the widespread of the heresy of Judaisers in
Russia, and estimated the number of its followers at 20,000 people.
Persecutions began, after which many members of the sect pretended to return
to the bosom of the Orthodox Church while continuing to observe in secret the
rites of their sect.205
A consequence of all this was that the legislation on the Jews took, at the
time of Nicholas I a religious spin.206 The decisions and actions of Nicholas I
with regard to the Jews were affected, such as his insistence on prohibiting them
from having recourse to Christian servants, especially Christian nurses, for
work among the Jews undermines and weakens the Christian faith in women.
In fact, notwithstanding repeated prohibitions, this provision never was fully
applied and Christians continued to serve amongst the Jews.207
The first measure against the Jews, which Nicolas considered from the very
beginning of his reign, was to put them on an equal footing with the Russian
population with regard to the subjugation to compulsory service to the State,
and in particular, requiring them to participate physically in conscription, which
they had not been subjected to since their attachment to Russia. The bourgeois
Jews did not supply recruits, but acquitted 500 rubles per head.208 This measure
was not dictated solely by governmental considerations to standardise the
obligations of the population (the Jewish communities were in any case very
slow to pay the royalties, and moreover, Russia received many Jews from
Galicia where they were already required to perform military service); nor by
the fact that the obligation to provide recruits would reduce the number of
Jews not engaged in productive workrather, the idea was that the Jewish
recruit, isolated from his closed environment, would be better placed to join the
lifestyle of the nation as a whole, and perhaps even orthodoxy.209 Taken into
account, these considerations considerably tightened the conditions of the
conscription applied to the Jews, leading to a gradual increase in the number of
recruits and the lowering of the age of the conscripts.

204 JE, t. 11, pp. 709710.

205 LJE, t. 2, p. 509.
206 JE, 1.11, p. 710.
207 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 3031.
208 V. N. Nikitin, Evrei zemlevladeltsy: Istoritcheskoe. zakonodatelnoe, administrativnoe i
bytovoe polojenie kolonij so vremeni ikh vozniknovenia do nachikh dne [Jewish farmers:
historical, legislative, administrative and concrete situation of the colonies from their
creation to the present day], 18071887, Saint Petersburg, 1887, p. 263.
209 JE, t. 13, p. 371.
 It cannot be said that Nicolas succeeded in enforcing the decree on the
military service of the Jews without encountering resistance. On the contrary, all
instances of execution proceeded slowly. The Council of Ministers discussed at
length whether it was ethically defensible to take such a measure in order to
limit Jewish overcrowding; as stated by Minister of Finance Georg von
Cancrin, all recognise that it is inappropriate to collect humans rather than
money. The Kehalim did not spare their efforts to remove this threat from the
Jews or to postpone it. When, exasperated by such slow progress, Nicholas
ordered a final report to be presented to him in the shortest delays, this order, it
seems, only incited the Kehalim to intensify their action behind the scenes to
delay the advancement of the matter. And they apparently succeeded in winning
over to their cause one of the high officials, whereby the report never reached
its destination! At the very top of the Imperial apparatus, this mysterious
episode, concludes J. Hessen, could not have occurred without the
participation of the Kahal. A subsequent retrieval of the report was also
unfulfilled, and Nicolas, without waiting any longer, introduced the conscription
for the Jews by decree in 1827210 (then, in 1836, equality in obtaining medals for
the Jewish soldiers who had distinguished themselves211).
Totally exempted from recruitment were the merchants of all guilds,
inhabitants of the agricultural colonies, workshop leaders, mechanics in
factories, rabbis and all Jews having a secondary or higher education. 212 Hence
the desire of many Jewish bourgeois to try to make it into the class of
merchants, bourgeois society railing to see its members required to be drafted
for military service, undermining the forces of the community, be it under the
effect of taxation or recruitment. The merchants, on the other hand, sought to
reduce their visible exposure to leave the payment of taxes to the bourgeois.
Relations between Jewish merchants and bourgeois were strained, for at that
time, the Jewish merchants, who had become more numerous and wealthier,
had established strong relations in governmental spheres. The Kahal of Grodno
appealed to Saint Petersburg to demand that the Jewish population be divided
into four classesmerchants, bourgeois, artisans, and cultivatorsand that
each should not have to answer for the others213. (In this idea proposed in the
early 30s by the Kehalim themselves, one can see the first step towards the
future categorisation carried out by Nicolas in 1840, which was so badly
received by the Jews.)
The Kehalim were also charged with the task of recruiting among the
Jewish mass, of which the government had neither recorded numbers nor
profiles. The Kahal put all the weight of this levy on the backs of the poor, for
it seemed preferable for the most deprived to leave the community, whereas a
reduction in the number of its wealthy members could lead to general ruin. The

210 Hessen*, t. 2, pp. 3234.

211 JE, t. 11, pp. 468469.
212 LJE, t. n7, p. 318.
213 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 6871.
Kehalim asked the provincial authorities (but they were denied) the right to
disregard the turnover in order to be able to deliver to recruitment the tramps,
those who did not pay taxes, the insufferable troublemakers, so that the
owners who assume all the obligations of society should not have to provide
recruits belonging to their families; and in this way the Kehalim were given the
opportunity to act against certain members of the community.214
However, with the introduction of military service among the Jews, the
men who were subject to it began to shirk and the full count was never reached.
The cash taxation on Jewish communities had been considerably diminished,
but it was noticed that this did by no means prevent it from continuing to be
refunded only very partially. Thus, in 1829, Nicholas I granted Grodnos request
that in certain provinces Jewish recruits should be levied in addition to the tariff
imposed in order to cover tax arrears. In 1830 a Senate decree stipulated that
the appeal of an additional recruit reduced the sums owed by the Kahal of 1,000
rubles in the case of an adult, 500 rubles in the case of a minor. 215 It is true that
following the untimely zeal of the governors this measure was soon reported,
while Jewish communities themselves asked the government to enlist recruits
to cover their arrears. In government circles this proposal was welcomed
coldly, for it was easy to foresee that it would open new possibilities of abuse
for the Kehalim.216 However, as we can see, the idea matured on one side as
well as on the other. Evoking these increased stringencies in the recruitment of
Jews by comparison with the rest of the population, Hessen writes that this was
a glaring anomaly in Russian law, for in general, in Russia, the legislation
applicable to the Jews did not tend to impose more obligations than that of other
citizens.217
Nicholas Is keen intelligence, inclined to draw clearly legible perspectives
(legend has it that the Saint Petersburg Moscow railway was, as a result,
mapped out with a ruler!), in his tenacious determination to transform the
particularist Jews into ordinary Russian subjects, and, if possible, into Orthodox
Christians, went from the idea of military recruitment to that of Jewish
cantonists. The cantonists (the name goes back to 1805) was an institution
sheltering the children of the soldiers (lightening in favour of the fathers the
burden of a service which lasted twentyfive years!); it was supposed to
extend the sections for military orphans created under Peter the Great, a kind
of school for the government which provided the students with technical
knowledge useful for their subsequent service in the army (which, in the eyes of
civil servants, now seems quite appropriate for young Jewish children, or even
highly desirable to keep them from a young age and for long years cut off from
their environment. In preparation to the cantonist institution, an 1827 decree
granted Jewish communities the right to recruit a minor instead of an adult,

214 Ibidem, pp. 5961.

215 LJE, t. 7, p. 317.
216 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 6465.
217 Ibidem, p. 141.
from the age of 12 (that is, before the age of nuptiality among the Jews). The
New Jewish Encyclopedia believes that this measure was a very hard blow.
But this faculty in no way meant the obligation to call a soldier at the age of
12218, it had nothing to do with the introduction of compulsory conscription for
Jewish children,219 as wrote erroneously the Encyclopedia, and as it ended up
being accredited in the literature devoted to the Jews of Russia, then in the
collective memory. The Kehalim even found this a profitable substitution and
used it by recruiting the orphans, the children of widows (sometimes bypassing
the law protecting only children), often for the benefit of the progeny of a rich
man.220 Then, from the age of 18, the cantonists performed the usual military
service, so long at the timebut let us not forget that it was not limited to
barracks life; the soldiers married, lived with their families, learned to practice
other trades; they received the right to establish themselves in the interior
provinces of the empire, where they completed their service. But,
unquestionably, the Jewish soldiers who remained faithful to the Jewish religion
and its ritual suffered from being unable to observe the Sabbath or contravene
the rules on food.
Minors placed with cantonists, separated from their family environment,
naturally found it difficult to resist the pressure of their educators (who were
encouraged by rewards to successfully convert their pupils) during lessons of
Russian, arithmetic, but above all, of catechism; they were also rewarded for
their conversion, moreover, it was facilitated by their resentment towards a
community that had given them up to recruitment. But, conversely, the tenacity
of the Jewish character, the faithfulness to the religion inculcated at an early
age, made many of them hold their grounds. Needless to say, these methods of
conversion to Christianity were not Christian and did not achieve their purpose.
On the other hand, the accounts of conversions obtained by cruelty, or by death
threats against the cantonists, supposedly collective drownings in the rivers for
those who refused baptism (such stories received public attention in the decades
that followed), fall within the domain of pure fiction. As the Jewish
Encyclopedia published before the Revolution the popular legend of the few
hundred cantonists allegedly killed by drowning was born from the information
published in a German newspaper, according to which eight hundred
cantonists were taken away one fine day to be baptised in the water of a river,
two of them perished by drowning221
The statistical data from the Military Inspection Archives to the General
Staff222 for the years 18471854, when the recruitment of Jewish cantonists was
particularly high, showed that they represented on average only 2.4% of the
many cantonists in Russia, in other words, that their proportion did not exceed
218 Ibidem, p. 34.
219 LJE, t. 7, p. 317.
220 LJE. t. 4, pp. 7576.
221 JE, t. 9 (which covers the years 18471854), p. 243.
222 K. Korobkov, Evreskaa rekroutchina v tsarstvovanie Nikolaia 1 (The Recruitment of Jews
under the Reign of Nicolas I), in Evreskaia starina, Saint Petersburg, 1913, t. 6, pp. 7980.
that of the Jewish population in the country, even taking into account the
undervalued data provided by the Kehalim during the censuses.
Doubtlessly the baptised had an interest in exculpating themselves from
their compatriots in exaggerating the degree of coercion they had to undergo in
their conversion to Christianity, especially since as part of this conversion they
enjoyed certain advantages in the accomplishment of their service. Moreover,
many converted cantonists remained secretly faithful to their original religion,
and some of them later returned to Judaism.223

In the last years of the reign of Alexander I, after a new wave of famine in
Belarus (1822), a new senator had been sent on mission: he had come back with
the same conclusions as Derzhavin a quarter of a century before. The Jewish
Committee established in 1823, composed of four ministers, had proposed to
study on what grounds it would be expedient and profitable to organise the
participation of the Jews in the State and to put down in writing all that could
contribute to the improvement of the civil situation of this people. They soon
realised that the problem thus posed was beyond their strength, and in 1825 this
Jewish Committee at the ministerial level had been replaced by a Directors
Committee (the fifth), composed of the directors of their ministries, who
devoted themselves to studying the problem for another eight years.224
In his eagerness, Nicholas preceded the work of this committee with his
decisions. Thus, as we have seen, he introduced conscription for the Jews. This
is how he set a deadline of three years to expel the Jews from all the villages of
the western provinces and put an end to their activity of alcohol manufacturing,
but, as under his predecessors, this measure experienced slowdowns, stoppages,
and was ultimately reported. Subsequently, he prohibited Jews from holding
taverns and diners, from living in such places, and ensuring the retail sale of
alcohol in person, but this measure was not applied either.225
Another attempt was made to deny the Jews one of their favourite jobs: the
maintenance of post houses (with their inns and taverns), but again in vain
because, apart from the Jews, there was not enough candidates to occupy
them.226
In 1827, a leasing system of the distilling activities was introduced
throughout the empire, but there was a considerable fall in the prices obtained at
the auctions when the Jews were discarded and it happened that there was no
other candidate to take these operations, so that they had to be allowed to the
Jews, whether in the towns or in the countryside, even beyond the area of
residence. The government was, in fact, relieving the Jews of the responsibility

223 JE, t. 9, pp. 242243.

224 Ibidem, t. 7, pp. 443444.
225 Hessen, t. 2. p. 39.
226 JE, i. 12, p. 787 ; Hessen, t. 2, p. 39.
of organising the collection of taxes on liquor and thus receiving a regular
return.227 Long before the merchants of the first guild were allowed to reside in
any part of the empire, all farmers enjoyed the freedom to move and resided in
capitals and other cities outside the Pale of Settlement From the midst of the
farmers came prominent Jewish public men like Litman Feiguine, already
mentioned, and Evsel Gnzburg (he had held an alcohol manufacturing
tenancy in a besieged Sevastopol); In 1859 he founded in Saint Petersburg a
banking establishment one of the most important in Russia; later, he
participated in the placement of Russian Treasury bonds in Europe; he was the
founder of the dynasty of the Gnzburg barons 228). Beginning in 1848, all
Jewish merchants of the first guild were allowed to lease drinking places even
where Jews had no right to reside permanently.229
The Jews also received a more extensive right with respect to the
distillation of alcohol. As we remember, in 1819, they were allowed to distil it
in the provinces of Great Russia until Russian artisans acquire sufficient
competence. In 1826 Nicolas decided to repatriate them to the Pale of
Settlement, but in 1827 he conceded to several specific requests to keep
distillers in place, for example in the state factories in Irkutsk.230
Vladimir Solvoyov quotes the following thoughts from Mr. Katkov: In the
western provinces it is the Jew who deals with alcohol, but is the situation better
in the other provinces of Russia? The Jewish innkeepers who get the people
drunk, ruin the peasants and cause their doom, are they present throughout
Russia? What is happening elsewhere in Russia, where Jews are not admitted
and where the flow of liquor is held by an Orthodox bartender or a kulak? 231
Let us listen to Leskov, the great connoisseur of Russian popular life: In the
provinces of Greater Russia where Jews do not reside, the number of those
accused of drunkenness, or crimes committed under the influence, are regularly
and significantly higher than within the Pale of Settlement. The same applies to
the number of deaths due to alcoholism And this is not a new phenomenon: it
has been so since ancient times.232
However, it is true, statistics tell us that in the western and southern
provinces of the empire there was one drinking place per 297 inhabitants,
whereas in the eastern provinces there was only one for 585. The newspaper
The Voice, which was not without influence at the time, was able to say that the
trade of alcohol of the Jews was the wound of this areanamely the western

227 Ibidem, t. 5, p. 613.

228 Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. Reviewed, corrected and augmented, t. 1, Moscow,
1994, p. 317.
229 JE, t. 12. p. 163.
230 Ibidem*, t. 11, p. 710.
231 Letter from V. I. Soloviev to T. Gertz, in V. Soloviev, Evrcskij vopros khristianskij vopros
(The Jewish Problem is a Christian Problem), collection of articles, Warsaw, 1906, p. 25.
232 Nicolas Leskov, Evrei v Rossii: neskolko zametchanij po evreskomou voprosou. (The Jews
in Russia: A few remarks on the Jewish Problem). Petrograd, 1919 (reproduction of the ed.
of 1884). p. 31.
regionand an intractable wound at that. In his theoretical considerations,
I.G. Orchansky tries to show that the stronger the density in drinking places, the
less alcoholism there was (we must understand that, according to him, the
peasant will succumb less to temptation if the flow of drinks is found under his
nose and solicits him 24 hours a dayremember Derzhavin: the bartenders
trade night and day; but will the peasant be tempted by a distant cabaret, when
he will have to cross several muddy fields to reach it? No, we know only too
well that alcoholism is sustained not only by demand, but also by the supply of
vodka. Orchansky nevertheless pursues his demonstration: when the Jew is
interposed between the distiller and the drunken peasant, he acts objectively in
favour of the peasant because he sells vodka at a lower price, but it is true that
he does so by pawning the effects of the peasant. Certainly, he writes, some
believe nevertheless that Jewish tenants have a poor influence on the condition
of the peasants, but it is because, in the trade of bartending, as in all the other
occupations, they differ by their knowhow, skill and dynamism. 233 It is true
that elsewhere, in another essay of the same collection, he recognises the
existence of fraudulent transactions with the peasants; it is right to point out
that the Jewish trade is grossly deceitful and that the Jewish dealer, tavern
keeper and usurer exploit a miserable population, especially in the countryside;
faced with an owner, the peasant holds on firmly to his prices, but he is
amazingly supple and confident when dealing with a Jew, especially if the latter
holds a bottle of vodka in reserve the peasant is often brought to sell his
wheat dirt cheap to the Jew.234 Nevertheless, to this crude, glaring, arresting
truth, Orchansky seeks attenuating circumstances. But this evil that eats away
the will of the peasants, how to justify it?

Due to his insistent energy, Nicholas I, throughout his reign, did not only face
failures in his efforts to transform Jewish life in its different aspects.
This was the case with Jewish agriculture.
The Regulation on the obligations of recruitment and military service of
the Jews, dated 1827, stipulated that Jewish farmers transferred on private
plots were released, as well as their children, from the obligation to provide
recruits for a period of fifty years (exemption incurring from the moment they
actually began to engage in agricultural work). As soon as this regulation was
made public, more Jews returned to the colonies than those who had absented
themselves on their own initiative, that had been signalled absent.235
In 1829 a more elaborate and detailed regulation concerning Jewish
cultivators was published: it envisaged their access to the bourgeois class

233 I. Orchansky, Evrei v Rossii (Jews in Russia, essays and studies), fasc. 1, Saint Petersburg,
1872, pp. 192195, 200207.
234 Ibidem, pp. 114116, 124125.
235 Nikitin*, pp. 168169, 171.
provided that all their debts were paid; authorisation to absent themselves for up
to three months to seek a livelihood during periods when the land did not
require their physical work; sanctions against those who absent themselves
without authorisation, and rewards for distinguished agricultural leaders. V.
Nikitin admits: To compare the severe constraints imposed on Jewish farmers,
but with rights and privileges exclusively granted to the Jews, with those of
the other taxable classes, it must be observed that the government treated the
Jews with great benevolence.236
And, from 1829 to 1833, the Jews labour the land with zeal, fate rewards
them with good harvests, they are satisfied with the authorities, and vice versa,
and general prosperity is tainted only by fortuitous incidents, without great
importance. After the war with Turkey1829the arrears of taxes are
entirely handed over to the Jewish residents as to all the settlers for having
suffered from the passage of years. But according to the report of the
supervisory committee, the bad harvest of 1833 made it impossible to retain
[the Jews] in the colonies, it allowed many who had neither the desire nor the
courage to devote themselves to the agricultural work of sowing nothing, or
almost nothing, of getting rid of the cattle, going away from here and there, of
demanding subsidies and not paying royalties. In 1834, more than once, they
saw the sale of the grain which they had received, and the slaughter of the
cattle, which was also done by those who were not driven to do so by
necessity; The Jews received bad harvests more often than other peasants, for,
with the exception of insufficient seedlings, they worked the land haphazardly,
at the wrong time, which was due to the the habit, transmitted from generation
to generation, of practising easy trades, of mismanaging, and neglecting the
surveillance of livestock.237
One might have thought that three decades of unfortunate experiences in
the implementation of Jewish agriculture (compared to universal experience)
would suffice for the government to renounce these vain and expensive
attempts. But no! Did the reiterative reports not reach Nicholas I? Or were they
embellished by the ministers? Or did the inexhaustible energy and irrefragable
hope of the sovereign impel him to renew these incessant attempts?
In any case, Jewish agriculture, in the new Jewish Regulation dated 1835
and approved by the Emperor (the result of the work of the Directors
Committee), is not at all excluded, but on the contrary, enhanced: to organise
the lives of the Jews according to rules which would enable them to earn a
decent living by practising agriculture and industry, gradually dispensing
instruction to their youth, which would prevent them from engaging in idleness
or unlawful occupations. If the Jewish community were previously required to
pay 400 rubles per household, now every Jew was allowed to become a farmer
at any time, all tax arrears were immediately handed over to him, and to his
community; They were given the right to receive land from the state in

236 Ibidem, pp. 179181.

237 Ibidem*, pp. 185186. 190191.
usufruct without time limit (but within the Pale of Settlement), to acquire plots
of land, to sell them, to rent them. Those who became farmers were exempt
from taxation for twentyfive years, property tax for ten years, recruitment for
fifty years. In reverse, no Jew could be forced to become a farmer. The
industries and trades practised in the context of village life were also allowed to
them.238 (One hundred and fifty years have passed. Forgetful of the past, an
eminent and most enlightened Jewish physicist formulates his vision of Jewish
life in those days: A Pale of Settlement coupled with the prohibition (!) of
practicing agriculture.239 The historian and thinker M. Guerchenson uses a
more general formulation: Agriculture is forbidden to the Jew by the spirit of
his people because, by attaching to the land, man takes root more easily in a
given place.240)
The influential Minister of Finance, Cancrin, proposed to place the deserted
lands of Siberia at the disposal of Jewish agriculture; Nicolas gave his approval
to this project at the end of the same year 1835. It was proposed to attribute to
Jewish settlers up to 15 hectares of good land per male individual, with tools
and workhorses billed to the Treasury, and paid transportation costs, including
food. It seems that poor Jews, laden with large families, were tempted to
undertake this journey to Siberia. But this time the Kehalim were divided in
their calculations: these poor Jews were indeed necessary to satisfy the needs of
recruitment (instead of wealthy families); it was concealed from them that the
arrears were all handed over to them and they were required to carry them out
beforehand. But the government changed its mind, fearing the difficulties of a
transfer so far away, and that the Jews, on the spot, lacking examples of know
how and love of work, and would resume their sterile trade, which rested
essentially on dishonest operations that have already done so much harm in the
western provinces of the empire, their innkeeper occupations of ruining
inhabitants by satisfying their inclination for drinking, and so on. In 1837,
therefore, the transfer to Siberia was stopped without the reasons being
publicised.241 In the same year, the Inspectorate estimated that in New Russia
the plots of land reserved for Jewish settlers contained a black potting soil of
the highest quality, that they were perfectly suited to the cultivation of cereals,
that the steppes were excellent for the production of hay and livestock
farming. (local authorities, however, disputed this assessment).242
Also in the same year of 1837, a Ministry of Public Goods was established,
headed by Count P. Kiselyov, who was entrusted with the transition measure

238 Nikitin*, pp. 193197.

239 E. Gliner, Stikhia s tchelovctchcskim lilsom? (The element with a human face?), in Vremia
i my (International Review of Literature and Social Problems). New York, 1993, n 122, p.
133.
240 M. Guerchenson, Soudby evreskogo naroda (The Destinies of the Jewish People), in 22,
Literary and political review of the Jewish intelligentsia emigrated from the USSR to Israel,
TelAviv, n 19, 1981, p. 111.
241 Nikitin, pp. 197199. 202205, 209, 216.
242 Ibidem, pp. 229230.
intended to prepare the abolition of serfdom, the task of protecting the free
cultivators (the peasants of the Crown)there were seven and a half million of
them registeredincluding the Jewish farmersbut they were only 3,000 to
5,000 families, or a drop of water in the sea, relative to the number of peasants
of the Crown. Nevertheless, as soon as it was created, this ministry received
numerous petitions and recriminations of all kinds coming from Jews. Six
months later it became clear that it would be necessary to give the Jews so much
attention that the main tasks of the ministry would suffer.243 In 1840, however,
Kiselyov was also appointed president of a newly created committee (the sixth
one244) to determine the measures to be taken to reorganise the lives of the
Jews in Russia, meaning he also was to tackle the Jewish problem.
In 1839, Kiselyov had a law passed by the State Council authorising the
Jews on the waiting lists for recruitment to become cultivators (provided that
they were doing so with their whole family), which signified that they would
benefit from the major advantage of being dispensed with military service. In
1844, a still more detailed settlement concerning Jewish farmers gave them
even in the Pale of Settlementthe right to employ for three years Christians
who were supposed to teach them how to properly manage a farm. In 1840,
many Jews came to New Russia supposedly at their own expense (they
produced on the spot attestations that they had the means to do so), in fact,
they had nothing and made it known from their very first days that their
resources were exhausted; there were up to 1,800 families of which several
hundred possessed neither papers nor any proof whatsoever of where they came
from and how they found themselves in New Russia; and they never ceased to
come running, begging not to be left to rot in their misery. Kiselyov ordered to
receive them by levying the spendings to the settlers in general, without
distinction of ethnic group. In other words, he assisted them well beyond the
amounts provided for. In 1847, additional ordinances were enacted to make it
easier for Jews to become farmers.245
Through his ministry, Kiselyov had the ambition to establish model
colonies and then to eventually settle this people on a large scale: for this
purpose, he set up one after the other colonies in the province of Ekaterinoslav,
on fertile soils, well irrigated by rivers and streams, with excellent pastures and
hay fields, hoping very much that the new settlers would benefit from the
remarkable experience already gained by the German settlers, (but as it was
difficult to find volunteers among them to settle in the midst of the Jewish
settlements, it was decided to employ them as wage earners). New credits were
constantly granted to these future model colonies; all arrears were remitted to
them. In the second year of their settlement, Jewish families were required to
have at least one vegetable garden and one seeded hectare, and to ensure a slow
increase in the area sown over the years. Insofar as they had no experience in

243 Ibidem, pp. 232234.

244 JE, t. 9, pp. 488489.
245 Nikitin, pp. 239, 260263. 267, 355, 358.
the selection of livestock, this task was entrusted to the curators. Kiselyov
sought to facilitate the travelling conditions of families (accompanied by a small
number of day labourers) and to find ways to provide specialised agricultural
training to a certain contingent of settlers. But in some families there was still
very little to worry about agronomy: in extreme cold, people did not even go out
to feed the beastsso they had to equip them with long hooded coats!246
In the meantime, the flow of Jews migrating to agriculture did not dry up,
especially since the western provinces suffered from bad harvests. Families that
did not include the necessary number of ablebodied men were often
dispatched, the Kehalim sent by force the destitute and invalid, retaining the
rich and healthy to have the possibility of better responding to collections, to
pay royalties and thereby maintain their institutions. In order to prevent the
influx of a large number of needy destitutes, the ministry had to demand that
the governors of the western provinces have strict control over the departures
but, on site, departures of contingents were hastened without even waiting to
know whether lodging was ready; moreover, the credits allocated to the starters
were retained, which sometimes compromised a whole year of agricultural
work. In the province of Ekaterinoslav, there was not even time to distribute the
land to the volunteers: 250 families left on their own to settle in Odessa.247
However, the reports of various inspectors from different places blended as
one: By submitting to this end, [the Jews] could make good, or even excellent,
farmers, but they take advantage of the first occasion to abandon the plough, to
sacrifice their farms, and to return to horsetrading and their favourite
occupations. For the Jew, the number one job is the industry, even the most
humble, of total insignificance, but on condition that it provides the greatest
profit margin Their fundamentally industrious mindset found no satisfaction
in the peaceful life of the cultivator, did not create in them the slightest desire
to devote themselves to agriculture; what attracted them there was first and
foremost the abundance of land, the scarcity of the Jewish population, the
proximity of borders, trade and lucrative industry, not to mention the franchises
which exempted them from royalties and conscription. They thought they
would only be compelled to organise their houses; as to lands, they hoped to
lease them at an appreciable rate, in order to occupy themselves, as in the past,
with commerce and industry. (This is what they declared naively to the
inspectors.) And it was with total disgust that they tackled the work of the
earth. Moreover, religious rules did not favour the Jewish cultivators, they
forced them to long periods of inactivity, as, for example, during the spring
plantings, the long Passover holiday; In September, that of the Tabernacles
lasted fourteen days at the time when intensive agricultural work, such as soil
preparation and sowing, is needed, although, according to the opinion of Jews
who deserve all trust, Scripture requires strict observance during the first and
last two days of the celebrations. On the other hand, the spiritual leaders of

246 Ibidem, pp. 269, 277, 282, 300, 309, 329330, 346, 358, 367, 389391, 436443, 467.
247 Ibidem, pp. 309, 314, 354359, 364369.
Jewish settlements (there were sometimes as many as two prayer houses, one
for the Orthodoxor Mitnagdes, another for the Hasidim) entertained the
idea that as a chosen people they were not destined for the hard work of the
farmer, which is the bitter lot of the goyim. They rose late, devoted an entire
hour to prayer, and went away to work when the sun was already high in the
skyto which was added the Sabbath, resting from Friday night until Sunday
morning.248
From a Jewish point of view, I. Orchansky actually arrives at conclusions
similar to those of the inspectors: Leasing a farm and employing wage
earners encounters more sympathy among the Jews than the passage, in all
regards difficult, to agricultural labour We note a growing tendency for Jews
engaged in rural activity to exercise it first and foremost by leasing land and
using it through the assistance of wageearners. In New Russia, the failures of
Jewish agriculture stem from their lack of accustomed to physical labour and
the profits they derive from urban trades in southern Russia. But also to
emphasise the fact that in a given colony the Jews had built a synagogue with
their own hands, and that in others maintained vegetable gardens with their
own hands.249
Nevertheless, the numerous reports of the inspectors agreed that in the 40s
and in these model colonies, as in the past, the standard of living of the
settlers, their activities and their enterprises were well behind those of the
peasants of the Crown or landowners. In the province of Kherson, in 1845,
among the Jewish settlers, The farms are in a very unsatisfactory state, most of
these settlers are very poor: they dread the work of the land, and few cultivate it
properly; also, even in years of good harvest, they obtain only low yields; In
the plots, the soil is hardly stirred, women and children hardly work the land
and a lot of 30 hectares is barely enough for their daily subsistence. The
example of the German settlers is followed only by a very small number of
Jewish residents; most of them show a clear aversion to agriculture and they
comply with the demands of the authorities only to receive a passport that
allows them to go They leave a lot of land in fallow, work the land only in
certain places, according to the goodwill of each one they treat the cattle with
too much negligence harass the horses until they die, nourish them little,
especially on the days of the Sabbath; they milk delicate cows of the German
race at any hour of the day, so that they no longer give milk. Jews were
provided free fruit trees, but they did not plant orchards. Houses had been built
in advance for themsome were elegant, very dry and warm, solid; in other
places, they had been poorly constructed and expensive, but even where they
had been built reliably, with good quality materials the negligence of the
Jews, their inability to keep their lodgings in good condition had led them to
such a state of degradation that they could no longer be inhabited without urgent
repairs; they were invaded by humidity which led to their decay and favoured

248 Nikitin*, pp. 280285, 307, 420421, 434, 451, 548.

249 Orchansky, pp. 176, 182, 185, 191192.
diseases; many houses were abandoned, others were occupied by several
families at the same time without there being any kinship between them, and,
in view of the impetuous character of these people and their propensity to
quarrels, such cohabitation gave rise to endless complaints.250
Responsibility for unpreparedness for this large migration is evident to both
parties: poor coordination and delays in the administrations actions; here and
there, the development of the houses, poorly guarded, left much to be desired,
giving rise to many abuses and waste. (This led to the transfer of several
officials and trials for some of them.) But in the Jewish villages, the elders also
reluctantly controlled the careless ones whose farm and equipment deteriorated;
hence the appointment of supervisors chosen among retired noncommissioned
officers whom the Jews got drunk and coaxed with bribes. Hence also the
impossibility of levying royalties on the settlers, either on account of indigence
in every community there were only about ten farmers who were barely
capable of paying for themselves or because of the natural inclination of
the Jews to evade their payment; over the years, arrears only increased and
they were given again and again without requiring any reimbursement. For each
day of absence without authorisation, the settler paid only 1 kopeck, which
hardly weighed on him, and he easily compensated for it with the gains he made
in the city. (By way of comparison: in the villages the Melamed received from
3,000 to 10,000 rubles per year, and in parallel to the Melamed there had been
an attempt to introduce into the colonies, in addition to the use of the Jewish
language, a general education based on Russian and arithmetic, but simple
people had little confidence in the educational institutions founded by the
government.251)
It became more and more indisputable that the model colonies so
ardently desired by Kiselyov were just a dream; but, while curbing (1849) the
sending of new families, he did not lose hope and affirmed again in 1852 in one
of his resolutions: The more arduous an affair, the more one must be firm and
not to be discouraged by the first lack of successes. Until then, the curator was
not the true leader of the colony, he sometimes has to put up with the mockery
and insolence of the settlers who understood very well that he had no power
over them; he was entitled only to advise them. More than once, due to the
exasperation provoked by failures, projects had been proposed which would
have consisted in giving the settlers compulsory lessons in such a way that they
would have to put them into practice within a period of two or three days, with a
verification of results; to deprive them of the free disposal of their land; to
radically eliminate leave of absence; and even to introduce punishments: up to
thirty lashes the first time, double in case of recidivism, then prison, and,
depending on the seriousness of the offense, enlistment in the army. (Nikitin
asserts that this project of instruction, as soon as it was known, exerted such
terror upon the Jewish cultivators, that they redoubled their efforts, and

250 Nikitin, pp. 259, 280, 283, 286. 301. 304305, 321, 402403. 416419, 610.
251 Ibidem*, pp. 290, 301, 321325, 349, 399, 408, 420421, 475, 596.
hastened to procure cattle, to furnish themselves with agricultural tools and
showed an astonishing zeal in the work of the fields and the care taken to their
house. But Kiselyov gave his approval to a watereddown project (1853): The
lessons must correspond perfectly to the capacities and experience of those for
whom they are intended, the instructor responsible for organising agricultural
work can deviate from it only in the sense of a reduction in tasks, and for the
first offense, no punishment, for the second and third, ten to twenty lashes, no
more. (Enlistment in the army was never applied, no one has ever been
made a soldier for his failings at work, and in 1860, the act was definitively
repealed.252)
Let us not forget that we were still in the age of serfdom. But half a century
after the conscientious attempts of the government to entice the Jews to provide
productive labour on virgin lands, the outlines of the villages of Arakcheyev253
began to appear.
It is astonishing that the imperial power did not understand, at this stage,
the sterility of the measures taken, the desperate character of this whole
enterprise of returning to the land.
Furthermore, the process was not over

After the introduction of compulsory military service, alarming rumours spread

among the Jewish population, announcing a new and terrible legislation
prepared especially by the Jewish Committee. But in 1835, a General
Regulation concerning the Jews was finally promulgated (intended to replace
that of 1804), and, as the Jewish Encyclopdia discreetly notes, it imposed no
new limitations on the Jews.254 If we want to know more: this new regulation
preserved for Jews the right to acquire all kinds of immovable property
excluding inhabited areas, to conduct all kinds of commerce on an equal footing
with other subjects, but only within the Pale of Settlement. 255 These
Regulations of 1835 confirmed the protection of all the rights recognised to the
Jewish faith, introduced distinctions for the rabbis, conferring on them the
rights granted to the merchants of the first guild; established a reasonable age to
marry (18 and 16 years old); adopted measures to ensure that the Jewish attire
did not differ too much and did not cut off the Jews from the surrounding
population; oriented the Jews towards means of earning their livelihood through
productive labour (which prohibited only the sale of spirits on credit or secured

252 Ibidem*, p. 350351, 382385, 390, 425, 547, 679.

253 ount Alexis Araktchev (17691834), a favourite of Alexander I, creator of the military
colonies which were to house the soldiers with their families and replace the garrisons.
254 JE, 1.12, p. 695.
255 M. Kovalevsky, Ravnopravie evreev i ego vragui (The Equal Rights of Jews and their
Enemies), in Schit: literatournyj sbornik (Literary collection), under the dir. of L. Andreyev,
M. Gorky and F. Sologub, 3rd ed. increased, Moscow, Russian Society for the Study of
Jewish Life, 1916, p. 117.
on domestic effects), authorised all kinds of industrial activities (including the
renting of distilleries). To have Christians in their service was forbidden only
for regular employment but authorised for shortterm work (without the time
limits being specified) and for work in factories and factories, as well as as
an aide in the work of the fields, gardens and vegetable gardens 256 which
sounded like a mockery of the very idea of Jewish agriculture. The
Regulations of 1835 called upon Jewish youth to educate itself; it did not
restrict Jewish enrolment to secondary schools or university. 257 Jews who had
received the rank of doctor in any discipline, once recognised (not without
formalities) of their distinguished qualities, were entitled to enter in the service
of the State. (Jewish doctors already enjoyed this right.) With regard to local
government, the Regulation abrogated the previous limitations: from now on,
Jews could hold office in local councils, magistrates and municipalities under
the same conditions as if members of other faiths had been elected to office. (It
is true that some local authorities, particularly in Lithuania, objected to this
provision: in certain circumstances, the mayor has to lead his citizens to church
how could a Jew do it? Also, can a Jew sit among the judges when the oath is
sworn on the cross? In the face of these strong reservations, a decree in 1836
stipulated that in the western provinces the Jews could occupy in the magistracy
and the municipalities only one third of the positions. 258) Finally, with regard to
the thorny economic problem inherent in crossborder smuggling, which was so
detrimental to the interests of the State, the Regulation permitted the Jews
already residing there to remain there, but prohibited any new installations.259
For a State that still maintained millions of its subjects in serfdom, all that
has just been mentioned might not appear as a system of cruel constraints.
During the examination of the Regulation before the Council of State, the
discussions concerned the possibility of allowing the Jews free access to the
internal provinces of Great Russia, and the opinions expressed on this subject
were as numerous as they were varied. Some argued that to admit the Jews to
settle in the central provinces, they had to be able to justify certain moral
qualities and a sufficient level of education; others replied that Jews can be of
great use because of their commercial and industrial activity, and that
competition cannot be prevented by prohibiting anybody from residing and
practising commerce; it is necessary to raise the problem plainly put: can
the Jews be tolerated in this country? If one considers that they cannot be so,
then all must be cast out, rather than leave this category in the midst of the
nation in a situation likely to engender in them continuous discontent and
grumbles. And if it is necessary to tolerate their presence in this country, then
it is important to free them from any limitations placed on their rights.260

256 JE, t. 11, p. 494.

257 Kovalevsky, in Schit, p. 117.
258 Hessen*, t. 2, pp. 5052, 105106.
259 JE, t. 12, p. 599.
260 Hessen, t. 2. pp. 4748.
 Moreover, the archaic Polish privileges (abandoned by the Russian State
since the reign of Catherine) which granted urban communities the power to
introduce restrictions on the right of residence for the Jews reappeared with
further acuteness in Vilnius first, then in Kiev. In Vilnius, the Jews were
forbidden to settle in certain parts of the city. In Kiev, the local merchants were
indignant that the Jews, to the great displeasure of every one, engage in
commerce and business between the walls of the monasteries of Pechersk261
that they take over all commercial establishments in Pechersk and exclude
trade Christians; they urged the GovernorGeneral to obtain a ban (1827) on
the Jews to live permanently in Kiev Only a few categories of individuals
would be able to go there for a determined period of time. As always in such
circumstances, the Government was obliged to postpone on several occasions
the deadline set for their expulsion. The discussions went back to the
Directorial Committee, divided the Council of State into two equal camps,
but under the terms of the Regulation of 1835 Nicolas confirmed the expulsion
of the Jews from Kiev. However, shortly after, certain categories of Jews were
again allowed to reside temporarily in Kiev. (But why were Jews so lucky in
commercial competition? Often, they sold at lower prices than Christians,
contenting themselves with a lesser profit than the Christians demanded; but
in some cases, their merchandise was deemed to have come from smuggling,
and the governor of Kiev, who had taken the defense of the Jews, remarked that
if the Christians were willing to take the trouble, they could oust the Jews
without these coercive measures.262) Thus, in Belarus, the Jews had the right
to reside only in the towns; In Little Russia, they could live everywhere, with
the exception of Kiev and certain villages; In New Russia, in all inhabited
places with the exception of Nikolayev and Sevastopol, 263 military ports from
which the Jews had been banned for reasons related with the security of the
State.
The 1835 Regulations allowed merchants and [Jewish] manufacturers to
participate in the main fairs of the interior provinces in order to temporarily
trade there, and granted them the right to sell certain goods outside the Pale of
Settlement.264 In the same way, artisans were not entirely deprived of access to
the central provinces, even if only temporarily. According to the Regulation of
1827, the authorities of the provinces outside the Pale of Settlement had the
right to authorise the Jews to remain there for six months.265 Hessen points out
that the 1835 Regulations and subsequent laws extended somewhat for the
Jews the possibility of temporarily living outside the Pale of Settlement,
especially since the local authorities turned a blind eye when the Jews

261 Or the Grottoes: a group of monasteries whose origins go back to the middle of the
eleventh century and which still exist today.
262 Ibidem, pp. 4042.
263 LJE, t. 7, p. 318.
264 JE, t. 14, p. 944.
265 Ibidem, t. 11, p. 332.
bypassed the prohibitions.266 Leskov confirms in a note he wrote at the request
of the governmental committee: In the 40s, the Jews appeared in the villages
of Great Russia belonging to the great landowners in order to offer their
services Throughout the year, they rendered timely visits to the lords of their
acquaintance in the neighbouring provinces of Great Russia, and everywhere
they traded and tackled work. Not only were the Jews not driven out, they were
retained. Usually, people welcomed and gave refuge to Jewish artisans;
everywhere the local authorities treated them with kindness, for, as for the other
inhabitants, the Jews provided important advantages. 267 With the help of
interested Christians, the Jews violated the limiting decrees. And the authorities
were in their turn incited to derogate from the laws In the provinces of
Central Russia, it was decided to fix fines to be imposed on the owners who let
the Jews settle in their home.268
This is how, led by conservative (more specifically religious)
considerations of not wanting fusion between Christians and Jews, the
authorities of the Russian state, faced with the economic push that attracted
Jews beyond the Pale of Settlement, were unable either to make a clear decision
or to clearly apply it in practice. As for the dynamic and enterprising character
of the Jews, it suffered from too much territorial concentration and too strong
internal competition; it was natural for them to overflow as widely as possible.
As I. Orchansky observed: The more the Jews are scattered among the
Christian population, the higher is their standard of living.269
But it would be hard to deny that, even in its official perimeter, the Pale of
Settlement for Jews in Russia was very large: in addition to what had been
inherited from the dense Jewish grouping in Poland, the provinces of Vilnius,
Grodno, Kaunas, Vitebsk, Minsk, Mogilev, Volhynia, Podolsk and Kiev (in
addition to Poland and Courland) were added the vast and fertile provinces of
Poltava, Ikaterinoslav, Chernigov, Tauride, Kherson and Bessarabia, all together
larger than any state, or even group of European states. (A short time later, from
1804 to the mid30s, the rich provinces of Astrakhan and the Caucasus were
added, but the Jews hardly settled there; again in 1824, in Astrakhan, no Jew
was registered as taxable.270 This made fifteen provinces within the Pale of
Settlement, compared with thirtyone for Deep Russia. And few were more
populous than the provinces of central Russia. As for the Jews share of the
population, it did not exceed that of the Moslems in the provinces of the Urals
or the Volga. Thus the density of Jews in the Pale of Settlement did not result
from their number, but rather from the uniformity of their occupations. It was
only in the immensity of Russia that such an area might seem cramped.
It is objected that the extent of this area was illusory: it excluded all zones
outside cities and other agglomerations. But these spaces were agricultural areas
266 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 46, 48.
267 Leskov, pp. 4548.
268 Hessen, t. 2, p. 49.
269 Orchansky, p. 30.
270 JE. t. 3, p. 359.
or intended for agriculture, and it was understood that this domain, accessible to
the Jews, did not attract them; their whole problem was rather how to use these
spaces for alcohol trade. Which was a deviation.
And if the large Jewish mass had not moved from narrow Poland to vast
Russia, the very concept of the Pale of Settlement would never have been born.
In narrow Poland, the Jews would have lived densely piled up, with greater
poverty, growing rapidly without carrying out any productive work, 80% of the
population practising petty trade and the dealing of intermediaries.
In any case, nowhere in Russian cities were implemented obligatory ghettos
for the Jews, as was still known here and there in Europe. (If not the suburb of
Glebovo, in Moscow, for those who went there as visitors.)
Let us remember once more that this Pale of Settlement coexisted for three
quarters of a century with the serfdom of the majority of the Russian rural
population, and so, by comparison, the weight of these limitations to the
freedom of coming and going was somewhat lifted. In the Russian Empire,
many peoples lived by millions in high density areas within their respective
regions. Within the borders of a multinational state, peoples often lived
compactly more or less as separate entities. So it was with the example of the
Karaites and the Jews of the mountains, the latter having the freedom to
choose their place of residence but which they hardly used. No comparison is
possible with the territorial limits, the reserves imposed on the native
populations of conquered countries by colonisers (AngloSaxons or Spanish)
who came from elsewhere.
It is precisely the absence of a national territory among the Jews, given the
dynamism they displayed in their movements, their highly practical sense, their
zeal in the economic sphere, which promised to become imminently an
important factor influencing the life of the country as a whole. We can say that it
is on the one hand, the Jewish Diasporas need to access all the existing
functions, and on the other, the fear of an overflow of their activity which
fuelled the limiting measures taken by the Russian government.
Yes, as a whole, the Jews of Russia turned away from agriculture. In crafts,
they were preferably tailors, shoemakers, watchmakers, jewellers. However,
despite the constraints imposed by the Pale, their productive activity was not
limited to these small trades.
The Jewish Encyclopdia published before the Revolution writes that for
the Jews, before the development of heavy industry, what was most important
was the trade of money; irrespective of whether the Jew intervened as a
pawnbroker or money changer, as a farmer of public or private income, as
tenant or tenanthe was primarily involved in financial transactions. For even
in the period of rural economy in Russia, the demand for money was already
felt in everincreasing proportions.271 Thence, the transfer of Jewish capital into
this industry for them to participate in it. Already, under Alexander I, energetic
arrangements had been made to encourage the participation of Jews in industry,
271 JE, t. 13. p. 646.
especially in drapery. It subsequently played an important part in the
accumulation of capital in the hands of the Jews, and then they did not fail to
use this capital successively in factories and plants, mining, transportation and
banking. Thus began the formation of a lower and upper Jewish bourgeoisie.272
The Regulations of 1835 also provided privileges for Jewish manufacturers.273
By the 40s of the nineteenth century, the sugar industry had grown
considerably in the southwestern provinces. First, The Jewish capitalists began
by granting subsidies to the refineries belonging to the landowners, then by
assuming their administration, followed by becoming owners, and finally
building their own factories. In Ukraine and New Russia, powerful sugar
kings, among others Lazare and Lev Brodski. Most of these Jewish sugar
producers had begun in the distillery of alcohol or as tenants of cabarets.
This situation also took place in flourmilling.274
At the time, no contemporary understood or bothered to foresee what
power was being accumulated there, material first, then spiritual. Of course,
Nicholas I was the first not to see, nor understand. He had too high an opinion
of the omnipotence of the imperial power and of the efficiency of militarytype
administrative methods.
But he obstinately desired success in the education of the Jews so that the
Jews could overcome their extraneousness in relation to the rest of the
population, situation in which he saw a major danger. As early as 1831, he
pointed out to the Directors Committee that among the measures likely to
improve the situation of the Jews, special attention should be given to raising
them via education by the creation of factories, the prohibition of precocious
marriages, a better organisation of the Kehalim, a change in clothing
customs.275 And in 1840, when the Committee in charge of identifying
measures for a radical transformation of the life of Jews in Russia was
founded, one of the first aims envisaged by this committee was to promote the
moral development of the new generation by the creation of Jewish schools in a
spirit contrary to the Talmudic teaching currently in force.276
All the progressive Jews of that time also wanted general education (they
were only divided on whether to totally exclude the Talmud from the program
or to study it in the upper grades, with the illumination of a scientific approach,
thus relieved from undesirable additions277). A newly established general
education school in Riga was headed by a young graduate of the University of
Munich, Max Lilienthal, who aspired to invest himself in the spread of
education among Russian Jews. In 1840, he was cordially received in Saint
Petersburg by the ministers of the interior and education, and wrote to the

272 J.M. Dijour, Evrei v ekonomitchesko jizni Rossii (The Jews in Russian Economic life), in
BJWR1, pp. 164165.
273 JE, t. 15, p. 153.
274 Dijour, in LJE1, pp. 165168.
275 Hessen*, t. 2, p. 77.
276 Ibidem, p. 84; JE, t. 13. p. 47.
277 Hessen, t. 2, p. 83.
Committee for the Transformation of the Life of the Jews proposing the
project of a consistory and theology seminary with the aim of training rabbis
and teachers according to pure ethical foundations, as opposed to calcified
talmudists; However, before acquiring the essential principles of faith, it
would not be permissible to study profane matters. Thus the ministerial project
was modified: the number of hours devoted to the teaching of Jewish matters
was increased.278 Lilienthal also sought to persuade the government to take
preventive measures against the Hasidim, but without success: government
power wanted a front unifying the various Jewish social milieux who waged
war.279 Lilienthal, who had developed his school in Riga with amazing
success, was invited by the Ministry to visit the provinces of the Pale of
Settlement in order to contribute to the work of education, through public
meetings and conferences with Jewish personalities. His journey, at least
externally, was a great success; as a general rule, he met with little open
hostility and seemed to have succeeded in convincing the influential circles of
the Jewish world. The enemies of the reform had to express their approval
outwardly. But the hidden opposition was, of course, very important. And
when school reform was finally applied, Lilienthal renounced his mission. In
1844, he left unexpectedly for the United States, never to return. His departure
from Russiaperhaps a way of escaperemains shrouded in mystery.280
Thus, under Nicholas I, not only did the authorities not oppose the
assimilation of the Jews, but rather they called for it; however, the Jewish
masses who remained under the influence of the Kahal, feared constraining
measures in the religious sphere, and so did not lend themselves to it.
Nevertheless, school reform did begin in 1844, despite the extreme
resistance of the leaders of the Kehalim. (And although in creating these
Jewish schools there was no attempt to reduce the number of Jews in general
schools, on the contrary, it was pointed out that they should, as before, be open
to the Jews.281) Two kinds of Jewish public schools were created (modelled on
Jewish elementary schools in Austria282): two years, corresponding to Russian
parish schools, and four years, corresponding to district schools. Only Jewish
disciplines were taught by Jewish (and Hebrew) teachers; the others were given
by Russian teachers. (As Lev Deitch, a frenzied revolutionary, admits, The
crowned monster ordered them [Jewish children] to learn Russian. 283) For
many years, these schools were led by Christians, and were only led by Jews
much later.
Faithful to traditional Judaism, having learned or overshadowed the secret
objective of Uvarov [Minister of Education], the majority of the Jewish

278 Ibidem, p. 84; JE, t. 13. p. 47.

279 Hessen, t. 2. pp. 8586.
280 Ibidem, pp. 84, 8687.
281 JE, 1.13, pp. 4748.
282 Ibidem, t. 3, p. 334.
283 L Deitch, Roi evreev v rousskom revolioutsionnom dvjenii, (The Role of Jews in the
Russian Revolutionary Movement), t. 1, 2nd ed., MoscowLeningrad, GIZ, 1925, p. 11.
population saw in these government measures of education a means of
persecution like the others.284 (Said Uvarov, who, for his part, sought to bring
the Jews closer to the Christian population by eradicating prejudices inspired
by the precepts of the Talmud, wanted to exclude the latter entirely from the
education system, considering it as an antiChristian compendium 285).
Continuing for many years to distrust the Russian authorities, the Jewish
population turned away from these schools and fuelling a real phobia of them:
Just as the population sought to escape conscription, it distrusted these schools,
fearing to leave their children in these homes of freethinking. Welloff
Jewish families often sent to public schools not their own offspring, but those of
the poor.286 Thus was entrusted to a public school P. B. Axelrod 287; He then went
on to college, and then obtained broad political notoriety as Plekhanov and
Deitchs companion in the struggle within the Liberation of Labour 288). If in
1855 only the duly registered Heder had 70,000 Jewish children, the public
schools of both types received only 3,200.289
This fear of public education was perpetuated for a long time in Jewish
circles. In this way, Deitch remembers the 60s, not the middle of nowhere, but
in Kiev: I remember the time when my countrymen considered it a sin to learn
Russian and only tolerated its use in relations with the goyim.290 A. G.
Sliozberg remembers that, until the 70s, entering college was regarded as a
betrayal of the essence of Jewishness, the college uniform being a sign of
apostasy. Between Jews and Christians there was an abyss which only a few
Jews could cross, and only in the great cities where Jewish public opinion did
not paralyse the will of all.291 Young people attached to Jewish traditions did
not aspire to study in Russian universities, although the final diploma,
according to the Recruitment Law of 1827, dispensed one of military service for
life. However, Hessen points out that among Russian Jews belonging to the
most affluent circles, the spontaneous desire to integrate the public schools
was growing.292
He adds that in Jewish public schools not only the Christian
superintendents but the majority of Jewish teachers who taught the Jewish
disciplines in the German language were far from the required level. Thus, in
parallel with the establishment of these public schools, it was decided to
organise a graduate school intended for the training of teachers, to form better
educated rabbis capable of acting progressively on the Jewish masses. Rabbinic

284 JE, t. 9, p. 111.

285 Hessen, t. 2, p. 85.
286 Ibidem, p. 120.
287 Paul Axelrod (18501928), founder in Geneva of the very small group Liberation of
Labour embryo of the future Russian Social Democratic Party, founded in 1898.
288 Deitch, p. 1213.
289 I. M. Trotsky, The Jews in Russian Schools, in BJWR1, pp. 351354.
290 Deitch, p. 10.
291 JE, 1.11, p. 713.
292 Hessen, t. 11, p. 112.
schools of this type were founded in Vilnius and Zhytomir (1847). Despite
their shortcomings, these schools were of some use, according to the testimony
of the liberal J. Hessen, the rising generation was familiarising itself with the
Russian language and its grammar.293 The revolutionary Mr. Krol was of the
same opinion, but he also condemned the government unreservedly: The laws
of Nicholas I instituting primary public schools and rabbinic schools were
reactionary and hostile to the Jews; schools, willingly or unwillingly, allowed a
small number of Jewish children to learn secular education. As for the
enlightened intellectuals (the Maskilim) and those who now despised the
superstitions of the masses, they had no place to go, according to Krol, and
remained strangers amongst their own. Nevertheless, this evolution played an
enormous role in the spiritual awakening of Russian Jews during the second
half of the nineteenth century, even if the Maskilim, who wanted to enlighten
the Jewish masses, met with the fierce opposition of fanatical Jewish believers
who saw in profane science an alienation of the devil.294
In 1850 a kind of superstructure was created: an institute of Jewish
scholars, as well as a consulting inspectorate among the heads of academies.
Those who came from the newly created rabbinical schools occupied in
1857 the functions of public rabbis; Elected unwillingly by their community,
their designation was subject to the approval of the authorities of their province.
But their responsibility remained purely administrative: the Jewish communities
regarded them as ignoramuses in the Hebrew sciences, and the traditional rabbis
were maintained as genuine spiritual rabbis. 295 (Numerous graduates of
rabbinic schools, found no positions, neither as rabbis nor teachers, pursued
their studies at university296, then became doctors or lawyers.)
Nicholas I did not release his pressure to regulate the internal life of the
Jewish community. The Kahal, who already possessed an immense power over
the community, grew even stronger from the moment conscription was
introduced: it was given the right to give for recruitment at any moment every
Jew who did not pay his royalties, who had no fixed abode or committed
intolerable misdemeanors in Jewish society, and it used this right for the
benefit of the rich. All this nourished the indignation of the masses towards the
rulers of the Kehalim and became one of the causes of the irremediable decline
of the Kahal. Thus, in 1844, the Kehalim were dissolved everywhere, and
their functions were transmitted to municipalities and town halls297; In other
words, urban Jewish communities found themselves subject to the uniform
legislation of the state. But this reform was not completed either: the collection
of the arduous and evanescent arrears and the lifting of the recruits were again

293 Ibidem, p. 121.

294 M. Krol, Natsionalism i assimiliatsia v evresko islorii (Nationalism and Assimilation in
Jewish History), in JW, p. 188.
295 LJE, t. 4, p. 34; B. C. Dinour. Religiosnonatsionalnyj oblik rousskogo evrestva (The
Religious and National Profile of the Russian Jews) in BJWR1. p. 314.
296 Hessen, t. 2, p. 179.
297 LJE*, 1.4, pp. 2021.
entrusted to the Jewish community, whose recruiters and tax collectors were
substituted for the ancients of the Kehalim. As for the registry of births, and thus
the counting of the population, they remained in the hands of the rabbis.
The government of Nicolas also took a position on the inextricable problem
of the internal tax collection of Jewish communities, first of all on the socalled
casket (indirect tax on the consumption of kosher meat). A provision of 1844
specified that part of the proceeds should be used to cover public arrears in the
community, to finance the organisation of Jewish schools and to distribute
subsidies to Jews who devoted themselves to agriculture. 298 But there was also
an unexpected imbroglio: although the Jews were subject to the capitation on
the same basis as the Christian bourgeois, that is, to a direct tax, the Jewish
population, thanks to the amount of the casket, were, it is to say, in a
privileged position to pay the royalty; in fact, from then on Jews, including
the wealthiest, covered by personal payments only an insignificant part of the
taxes owed to the tax authorities, turning the balance into arrears, and these
never ceased to accumulate: by the mid50s, they exceeded 8 million rubles.
There followed a new imperial decree dictated by exasperation: for every
2,000 rubles of new arrears, an adult had to be provided as recruit.299
In 1844 a new and energetic attempt was madeagain abortedto expel
the Jews from the villages.
Hessen pictorially writes that in Russian laws designed to normalise the
lives of Jews, one hears as a cry of despair: in spite of all its authority, the
government fails to extirpate the existence of the Jews from the depths of
Russian life.300
No, the leaders of Russia had not yet realised the full weight and even the
unassimilability of the immense Jewish legacy received as a gift under the
successive divisions of Poland: what to do with this intrinsically resistant and
rapidly expanding group in the Russian national body? They could not find
reliable rulings and were all the more incapable of foreseeing the future. The
energetic measures of Nicholas I surged one after the other, but the situation
was apparently only getting more complicated.
A similar failure, which was escalating, followed Nicholas I in his struggle
against the Jewish contrabands at the frontiers. In 1843 he categorically ordered
the expulsion of all Jews from a buffer zone of fifty kilometres deep adjacent to
Austria and Prussia, in spite of the fact that at some frontier customs the
merchants who traded were practically all Jews.301 The measure was
immediately corrected by numerous exemptions: first, a twoyear period was
allowed for the sale of the goods, and then the duration was extended, and
material assistance was offered to the expellees for their new settlement;
furthermore, they were exempted for five years from all royalties. For several

298 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 8990.

299 JE, t. 12, p. 640.
300 Hessen, t. 2, p. 19.
301 Hessen, 1.1, p. 203.
years the transfer was not even initiated, and soon the government of Nicholas
I stopped insisting on the expulsion of the Jews from this border strip of fifty
kilometres, which allowed some of them to stay where they lived.302
It was on this occasion that Nicolas received a new warning of which he
did not measure the extent and the consequences for the whole of Russia: this
formidable but very partially enforced measure, intended to expel the Jews from
the frontier zone, motivated by a contraband which had assumed an extension
dangerous to the State, had aroused in Europe such indignation that it may be
asked whether it was not this measure that drastically confused European public
opinion with Russia. It may be said that this particular decree of 1843 must date
from the very beginning of the era when the Western Jewish world, in the
defense of its coreligionists in Russia, began to exert a decisive influence,
which, from then on, would never fall again.
One of the manifestations of this new attention was the arrival in Russia in
1846 of Sir Moses Montefiore, the bearer of a letter of recommendation from
Queen Victoria instructing him to obtain the improvement of the fate of the
Jewish population of Russia. He went to several cities of high Jewish density;
then, from England, sent a long letter to the emperor recommending the
emancipation of the Jews from all limiting legislation, to grant them equal
rights with all other subjects (with the exception, of course, of the serfs), in
the short term: to abolish all constraints in the exercise of the right to settle and
to circulate between the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, to allow
merchants and craftsmen to visit the provinces, to allow Christians to be
employed in the service of the Jews, to restore the Kahal303
But, on the contrary, Nicolas did not relinquish his determination to bring
order to the lives of the Jews of Russia. He resembled Peter the Great in his
resolution to structure by decree the whole State and the whole of society
according to his plan, and to reduce the complexity of society to simple, easily
understood categories, as Peter had formerly trimmed all that disturbed the
clear configuration of the taxable classes.
This time it was a question of differentiating the Jewish population from
the townsthe bourgeois. This project began in 1840; when the intention was
to go beyond the national and religious singularity of the Jews (the opinions of
Levinson, Feiguine, and Gueseanovsky were then examined), they endeavoured
to study the root of their obstinate isolation in relation to the absence of any
productive work in them, their harmful practice of small trades, accompanied
by all sorts of frauds and tricks. Regarding the idleness of many Jews, the
government circles blamed it on inveterate habits; they considered that the
Jewish mass might have been able to find livelihoods, but traditionally refused
to exercise certain types of employment.304

302 LJE, t. 7. p. 321.

303 Hessen, I. 2, pp. 107108.
304 Ibidem*, pp. 7980.
 Count Kiselyov proposed to the Emperor the following measure: without
affecting the Jewish merchants, perfectly wellsettled, to worry about the so
called bourgeois Jews, more precisely to divide them into two categories: to
count in the first those who benefit from goods and a solid sedentary lifestyle,
and include in the second those who are devoid of these factors and set a period
of five years for them to be made craftsmen in workshops, or farmers. (One
regarded as an artisan the one who enrolled forever in a workshop: as a
sedentary bourgeois, one who had enrolled in a workshop for a certain time. 305)
As for those who did not fulfil these conditions at the end of the period of five
years and remained confined to their former state, they would be considered
useless and subjected to military service and a period of work of a particular
type: they would be enrolled in the army (those 20 years old and onwards) in
number three times higher than the standard required, not for the usual twenty
five years of military service, but for only ten. And, meanwhile, they would be
used in the army or the navy by instilling in them, above all, different trades and
then, with their consent, they would make craftsmen or farmers. In other
words, they would be forcibly given vocational education. But the government
did not have the funds to do so and was considering using the casket tax, as
Jewish society could only be interested in this effort to rehabilitate its members
through labour.306
In 1840, Nicholas I gave his approval to the project. (The phrase
unnecessary Jews was replaced by not performing productive work.) All
measures to transform the lives of the Jews were reduced to a single decree
providing for the following steps: 1) regularisation of the collection of the
casket and suppression of the Kahal; 2) creation of general education schools
for Jews; 3) institution of parochial rabbis; 4) establishment of the Jews on
land belonging to the State for agricultural purposes; 5) categorisation; 6)
prohibition to wear the long garment. Kiselyov thought of introducing social
categorisation in a fairly distant future; Nicholas placed it before agriculture,
which, for a quarter of a century, had not ceased to be a failure.307
However, the categorisation provided for a period of five years for the
choice of occupations, and the measure itself was not announced until 1846,
meaning it could not turn into a reality until January 1852. (In 1843 the
GovernorGeneral of New Russia, Count Vorontsov, rose up against this
measure: he wrote that the occupations of this numerous class of merchants
and intermediaries were vilified and that [80%] of the Jewish population was
counted as useless elements, which meant that 80% of the Jews were mainly
engaged in trade, and Vorontsov hoped that, given the vast economic potential
of New Russia, any form of constraint could be limited, he did not think it
necessary to expel the Jews from the villages, but thought that it was enough to

305 JE, t. 13, p. 439.

306 Hessen*, t. 2. pp. 8182.
307 Ibidem, pp. 8283.
intensify their education. He warned that the categorisation would probably
arouse indignation in Europe.308)
Scalded by the way Europe had reacted to the attempt to expel the Jews
from the border area, the Russian government drew up a detailed statement on
the new measure in 1846: in Poland, Jews had neither citizenship nor the right
to own immovable property, and was therefore restricted to petty trading and the
sale of alcohol; incorporated in Russia, they saw the limits of their residence
extended, they received civil rights, access to the class of merchants in the
cities, the right to own real estate, to enter the category of farmers, the right to
education, including access to universities and academies.309
It must be admitted that the Jews did receive all these rights from the first
decades of their presence in the famous prison of the peoples. Nevertheless, a
century later, in a collection written by Jewish authors, one finds the following
assessment: When the annexation to Russia of the Polish provinces with their
Jewish population, promises were made concerning Rights, and attempts to
realise them [italics are mine, A. S.; said promises were kept, and the attempts
were not without success]. But at the same time, mass expulsions outside
villages had begun (indeed, they had been outlined, but were never effective),
double taxation was implemented [which was not levied in a systematic way,
and eventually abandoned] and to the institution of the Pale of Settlement was
undertaken310 [we have seen that the borders of this area were originally a
geographical heritage]. If one thinks that this way of exposing history is
objective, then one will never reach the truth.
Unfortunately, however, the government communiqu of 1846 pointed out
that the Jews did not take advantage of many of these measures: Constantly
defying integration with the civil society in which they live, most kept their old
way of life, taking advantage of the work of others, which, on all sides,
legitimately entails the complaints of the inhabitants. For the purpose [of
raising the standard of living of the Jews], it is important to free them from their
dependence on the elders of the community, the heirs of the former leaders of
the Kahal, to spread education and practical knowledge in the Jewish
population, to create Jewish schools of general education, to provide means for
their passage to agriculture, to blur the differences of clothing which are unfair
to many Jews. As for the government, it esteems itself entitled to hope that the
Jews will abandon all their reprehensible ways of living and turn to a truly
productive and useful work. Only those who refuse to do so will be subject to
incentivised measures for parasitic members affecting society and harming
it.311
In his reply to this text, Montefiore condemned the categorisation by
insisting that all the misfortune came from the limitations imposed on the free

308 Ibidem, pp. 100103.

309 Ibidem, p.103.
310 Dinour, in BJWR1. p. 319.
311 Hessen*. t. 2. pp. 103104.
circulation of the Jews and their trade. Nicolas retorted that if the passage of the
Jews to productive work was successful, time, of itself, would gradually
mitigate these limitations.312 He was counting on the possibility of reeducation
through work Being held in check here and there, and elsewhere in his efforts
to transform the way of life of the Jews, he had the ambition to break the Jews
tendency to close in on themselves and to solve the problem of their integration
with the surrounding population through labour, and the problem of labour by
drastically reinforced conscription. The reduction of the length of military
service for the Jews (from 25 to ten years) and the intention of providing them
with vocational training was scarcely clear; what was perceived concretely was
the levying of recruits, now proportionately three times more numerous than
among Christians: Ten recruits per year per thousand male inhabitants, and for
Christians seven recruits per thousand once every two years.313
Faced with this increase in recruitment, more people sought to escape.
Those who were designated for conscription went into hiding. In retaliation, at
the end of 1850, a decree stipulated that all recruits not delivered on time should
be compensated by three additional recruits in addition to the defaulter! Now
Jewish communities were interested in capturing the fugitives or replacing them
with innocent people. (In 1853 a decree was issued enabling Jewish
communities and private individuals to present as a recruit any person taken
without papers.) The Jewish communities were seen to have paid takers or
snatchers who captured their catch314; they received from the community a
receipt attesting that the community had used their services when handing over
those who did not respond to the call, or who carried expired passportseven if
they were from another provinceor teenagers without a family.
But that was not enough to compensate for the missing recruits. In 1852
two new decrees were added: the first provided for each recruit provided in
excess of the quota imposed, to relieve the community of 300 rubles of
arrears315; the second prohibited the concealment of Jews who evaded military
service and demanded severe punishment for those who had fled conscription,
imposed fines on the communities that had hidden them, and, instead of the
missing recruits, to enlist their relatives or the community leaders responsible
for the delivery of the recruits within the prescribed time limits. Seeking by all
means to escape recruitment, many Jews fled abroad or went to other
provinces.316
From then on, the recruitment gave rise to a real bacchanale: the
snatchers became more and more fierce; on the contrary, men in good health
and capable of working scurried off, went into hiding, and the backlogs of the
communities grew. The sedentary and productive part uttered protests and
demands: if recruitment began to strike to an equal extent the useful elements
312 Ibidem, pp. 107110.
313 LJE. t. 4. p. 75.
314 JE, t. 9. p. 243.
315 Hessen, 1.2. p. 115.
316 LJE, t. 7, p. 323.
and those which do not exercise productive work, then the vagabonds will
always find means of hiding and all the weight of the recruitment would fall on
the useful, which would spread among them disorder and the ruin.317
The administrative overflows made the absurdity of the situation clear
because of the difficulties that ensued; questions were raised, for example,
about the different types of activity: are they useful or not? This fired up the
Saint Petersburg ministries.318 The Council of State demanded that the social
categorisation be delayed so long as the regulations of the workshops were not
elaborated. The Emperor, however, did not want to wait. In 1851, the
Provisional Rules for the Categorisation of Jews, and Special Rules for
Jewish Workshops were published. The Jewish population was deeply
concerned, but according to the testimony of the Governor General of the
SouthWest, it no longer believed that this categorisation would enter into
force.319
And, in fact, it did not take place; the Jewish population was not
divided into categories.320 In 1855, Nicholas I died suddenly, and categorisation
was abandoned forever.
Throughout the years 18501855, the sovereign had, on the whole,
displayed a limitless sense of pride and selfconfidence, accumulating gross
blunders which stupidly led us into the Crimean war against a coalition of
States, before suddenly dying while the conflict was raging.
The sudden death of the Emperor saved the Jews from a difficult situation,
just as they were to be saved a century later by the death of Stalin.
Thus ended the first six decades of massive presence of Jews in Russia. It
must be acknowledged that neither their level nor their lack of clarity prepared
the Russian authorities at that time to face such an ingrained, gnarled and
complex problem. But to put on these Russian leaders the stamp persecutors of
the Jews amounts to distorting their intentions and compounding their abilities.

317 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 114118.

318 Ibidem, p. 112.
319 JE, 1.13, p. 274.
320 Hessen, t. 2, p. 118.
 Chapter 4. In the Age of Reforms

At the moment of the ascension of Alexander II to the throne, the Peasant

Question in Russia had been overripe for a century and demanded immediate
resolution. Then suddenly, the Jewish Question surfaced and demanded a no
less urgent solution as well. In Russia, the Jewish Question was not as ancient
as the deep-rooted and barbaric institution of serfdom and up to this time it did
not seem to loom so large in the country. Yet henceforth, for the rest of 19th
century, and right to the very year of 1917 in the State Duma, the Jewish and the
Peasant questions would cross over and over again; they would contend with
each other and thus become intertwined in their competing destiny.
Alexander II had taken the throne during the difficult impasse of the
Crimean War against a united Europe. This situation demanded a difficult
decision, whether to hold out or to surrender.
Upon his ascension, voices were immediately raised in defense of the
Jewish population. After several weeks, His Majesty gave orders to make
the Jews equal with the rest of population in respect to military duty, and to end
acceptance of underage recruits. (Soon after, the skill-category draft of
Jewish philistines was cancelled; this meant that all classes of the Jewish
population were made equal with respect to compulsory military service.321)
This decision was confirmed in the Coronation Manifesto of 1856: Jewish
recruits of the same age and qualities which are defined for recruits from other
population groups are to be admitted while acceptance of underage Jewish
recruits was to be abolished.322 Right then the institution of military cantonists
was also completely abolished; Jewish cantonists who were younger than 20
years of age were returned to their parents even if they already had been turned
into soldiers. [Cantonists were the sons of Russian conscripts who, from 1721,
were educated in special canton (garrison) schools for future military service].
The lower ranks who had served out their full term (and their descendents)
received the right to live anywhere on the territory of the Russian Empire. (They
usually settled where they terminated their service. They could settle

321 Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya [The Jewish Encyclopedia] (henceforthEE [JE]): V 16 T.

Sankt-St.Petersburg.: Obshchestvo dlya Nauchnikh Evreyskikh Izdaniy I Izd-vo Brokrauz-
Efron [Society for Scientific Jewish Publications and Brokrauz-Efron Publishing House],
1906-1913. T 13, p. 373-374.
322 EE* [JE], T 3, p. 163.
permanently and had often become the founders of new Jewish communities.323
In a twist of fate and as a historical punishment, Russia and the Romanov
Dynasty got Yakov Sverdlov from the descendents of one such cantonist
settler.324)
By the same manifesto the Jewish population was forgiven all
[considerable] back taxes from previous years. (Yet already in the course of
the next five years new tax liabilities accumulated amounting to 22% of the
total expected tax sum.325)
More broadly, Alexander II expressed his intention to resolve the Jewish
Question and in the most favorable manner. For this, the approach to the
question was changed drastically. If during the reign of Nicholas I the
government saw its task as first reforming the Jewish inner life, gradually
clearing it out through productive work and education with consequent removal
of administrative restrictions, then during the reign of Alexander II the policy
was the opposite: to begin with the intention of integrating this population with
the native inhabitants of the country as stated in the Imperial Decree of 1856. 326
So the government had began quick removal of external constraints and
restrictions not looking for possible inner causes of Jewish seclusion and
morbidity; it thereby hoped that all the remaining problems would then solve
themselves.
To this end, still another Committee for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life
was established in 1856. (This was already the seventh committee on Jewish
affairs, but by no means the last). Its chairman, the above-mentioned Count
Kiselyov, reported to His Majesty that the goal of integrating Jews with the
general population is hindered by various temporary restrictions, which, when
considered in the context of general laws, contain many contradictions and
beget bewilderment. In response, His Majesty ordered a revision of all
existing statutes on Jews to harmonize them with the general strategy directed
toward integration of this people with the native inhabitants, to the extent
afforded by the moral condition of Jews; that is, the fanaticism and economic
harmfulness ascribed to them.327
No, not for nothing had Herzen struggled with his Kolokol, or Belinsky and
Granovsky, or Gogol! (For although not having such goals, the latter acted in
the same direction as the former three did.) Under the shell of the austere reign
of Nicholas I, the demand for decisive reforms and the will for them and the
323 Ibid. T 11, p. 698; Yu Gessen*. Istoriya evreyskogo naroda v Rossii [History of the Jewish
People in Russia] (henceforthYu. Gessen): V 2 T. L., 1925-1927. T 2, p. 160.
324 Kratkaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopedia [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia] (henceforth KEE
[SJE] ): [V 10 T.] Jerusalem, 1976-2001. T 4, p. 79.
325 Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 183.
326 M. Kovalevskiy*. Ravnopravie evreyev i ego vragi [Jewish Equal Rights and its Opponents]
// Shchit: Literaturniy sbornik [Shchit: A Literary Anthology] / Under the Editorship of L.
Andreyev, M Gorkiy, and F. Sologub. 3rd Edition., dop. M.: Russkoe Obshchestvo dly
izucheniya evreyskoy zhizni [Russian Society for the Study of Jewish Life], 1916, p. 117-
118.
327 EE [JE], T 1, p. 812-813.
people to implement them were building up, and, astonishingly, new projects
were taken by the educated high governmental dignitaries more enthusiastically
than by educated public in general. And this immediately impacted the Jewish
Question. Time after time, the ministers of Internal Affairs (first Lanskoi and
then Valuev) and the Governors General of the Western and Southwestern Krais
[administrative divisions of Tsarist Russia] shared their suggestions with His
Majesty who was quite interested in them. Partial improvements in the legal
situation of the Jews were enacted by the government on its own initiative, yet
under direct supervision by His Majesty.328 These changes went along with the
general liberating reforms which affected Jews as well as the rest of population.
In 1858, Novorossiysk Governor General Stroganov suggested immediate,
instant, and complete equalization of the Jews in all rights but the
Committee, now under the chairmanship of Bludov, stopped short, finding itself
unprepared for such a measure. In 1859 it pointed out, for comparison, that
while the Western-European Jews began sending their children to public
schools at the first invitation of the government, more or less turning
themselves to useful occupations, the Russian government has to wrestle with
Jewish prejudices and fanaticism; therefore, making Jews equal in rights with
the native inhabitants cannot happen in any other way than a gradual change,
following the spread of true enlightenment among them, changes in their inner
life, and turning their activity toward useful occupations.329
The Committee also developed arguments against equal rights. It suggested
that the question being considered was not so much a Jewish question, as it was
a Russian one; that it would be precipitous to grant equal rights to Jews before
raising the educational and cultural level of Russian population whose dark
masses would not be able to defend themselves in the face of the economic
pressure of Jewish solidarity; that the Jews hardly aspire toward integration with
the rest of the citizens of the country, that they strive toward achieving all civil
rights while retaining their isolation and cohesion which Russians do not
possess among themselves.
However, these voices did not attain influence. One after another,
restrictions had been removed. In 1859 the Prohibition of 1835 was removed: it
had forbidden the Jews to take a lease or manage populated landowners lands.
(And thus, the right to rule over the peasants; though that prohibition was in
some cases secretly violated. Although after 1861 lands remaining in the
property of landowners were not formally populated.) The new changes were
aimed to make it easier for landowners to turn for help to Jews if necessary in
case of deterioration of in the manorial economy, but also in order to somewhat
widen the restricted field of economic activity of the Jews. Now the Jews
could lease these lands and settle on them though they could not buy them. 330
Meanwhile in the Southwestern Krai capital that could be turned to the

328 Ibid. p. 808.

329 Ibid. p. 814-815; Yu Gessen*, T 2, p. 147-148.
330 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 163.
purchase of land was concentrated in the hands of some Jews yet the Jews
refused to credit landowners against security of the estate because estates could
not be purchased by Jews. Soon afterwards Jews were granted the right to buy
land from landowners inside the Pale of Settlement.331
With development of railroads and steamships, Jewish businesses such as
keeping of inns and postal stations had declined. In addition, because of new
liberal customs tariffs introduced in1857 and 1868, which lowered customs
duties on goods imported into Russia, profits on contraband trade had
immediately and sharply decreased.332
In 1861 the prohibition on Jews to acquire exclusive rights to some sources
of revenue from estates was abolished. In the same year the systems of tax
farming and wine farming [translators note: concessions from the state to
private entrepreneurs to sell vodka to the populace in particular regions] were
abolished. This was a huge blow to a major Jewish enterprise. Among Jews,
tax collector and contractor were synonyms for wealth; now Orshansky
writes, they could just dream about the time of the Crimean War, when
contractors made millions, thanks to the flexible conscience and peculiar view
of the Treasury in certain circles; thousands of Jews lived and got rich under
the beneficial wing of tax farming. Now the interests of the state had begun to
be enforced and contracts had become much less profitable. And trading in
spirits had become far less profitable than under the tax farming
system.333 However, as the excise was introduced in the wine industry in place
of the wine farming system, no special restrictions were laid on Jews and so
now they could sell and rent distillation factories on a common basis in the
Pale of Settlement provinces.334 And they had so successfully exercised this
right to rent and purchase over next two decades that by the 1880s between 32
% and 76 % of all distillation factories in the Jewish Pale of Settlement
belonged to Jews, and almost all of them fell under category of a major
enterprise.335 By 1872, 89 % of distillation factories in the Southwestern Krai
were rented by Jews.336 From 1863 Jews were permitted to run distillation in
Western and Eastern Siberia (for the most remarkable specialists in the
distillation industry almost exclusively came from among the Jews), and from
1865 the Jewish distillers were permitted to reside everywhere.337

331 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 164.

332 Ibid. p. 161-162.
333 I. Orshanskiy. Evrei v Rossii: Ocherki i issledovaniya [The Jews in Russia: Essays and
Research]. Vip. 1 (henceforthI. Orshanskiy). Sankt-St. Petersburg., 1872, p. 10-11.
334 V.N. Nikitin. Evrei zemledeltsi: Istoricheskoe, zakonodatelnoe, administrativnoe i bitovoe
polozhenie kolonii co vremeni ikh vozniknoveniya do nashikh dney 1807-1887 [ Jewish
Farmers: the Historical, Legal, Administrative, and Everyday Condition of the Colonies,
from the Time of Their Origin to Our Days. 1807-1887]. (henceforthV.N. Nikitin). Sankt-
St. Petersburg, 1887, p. 557.
335 EE [JE], T 5, p. 610-611.
336 Ibid. T 13, p. 663.
337 Ibid*, T 5, p. 622.
 Regarding the spirits trade in the villages, about one-third of the whole
Jewish population of the Pale lived in villages at the start of 1880s, with two or
three families in each village,338 as remnants of the korchemstvo [from tavern
the state-regulated business of retail spirits sale]. An official government
report of 1870 stated that the drinking business in the Western Krai is almost
exclusively concentrated in the hands of Jews, and the abuses encountered in
these institutions exceed any bounds of tolerance.339 Thus it was demanded of
Jews to carry on the drinking business only from their own homes. The logic of
this demand was explained by G. B. Sliozberg: in the villages of Little Russia
[Ukraine], that is, outside of the legal limits of the Polish autonomy, the
landowners did not have the right to carry on trade in spirits and this meant
that the Jews could not buy spirits from landowners for resale. Yet at the same
time the Jews might not buy even a small plot of peasant land; therefore, the
Jews rented peasant homes and conducted the drinking business from them.
When such trade was also prohibited the prohibition was often evaded by
using a front business: a dummy patent on a spirits business was issued to a
Christian to which a Jew supposedly only served as an attendant.340
Also, the punitive clause (as it is worded in the Jewish Encyclopedia), that
is, a punishment accompanying the prohibition against Jews hiring a Christian
as a personal servant, was repealed in 1865 as incompatible with the general
spirit of the official policy of tolerance. And so from the end of the 1860s
many Jewish families began to hire Christian servants.341
Unfortunately, it is so typical for many scholars studying the history of
Jewry in Russia to disregard hard-won victories: if yesterday all strength and
attention were focused on the fight for some civil right and today that right is
attained then very quickly afterwards that victory is considered a trifle. There
was so much said about the double tax on the Jews as though it existed for
centuries and not for very few short years, and even then it was never really
enforced in practice. The law of 1835, which was at the time greeted by Jews
with a sense of relief, was, at the threshold of 20th century dubbed by S.
Dubnov as a Charter of Arbitrariness. To the future revolutionary Leo Deutsch,
who in the 1860s was a young and still faithful subject, it looked like the
administration did not strictly [enforce] some essential restrictions on
the rights of Jews, they turned a blind eye to violations; in general, the
life of Jews in Russia in the sixties was not bad. Among my Jewish peers I
did not see anyone suffering from depression, despondence, or estrangement as
a result of oppression by their Christian mates. 342 But then he suddenly

338 Yu. Larin. Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR [The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR].
Moscow; Leningrad: GIZ, 1929, p. 49.
339 I. Orshanskiy, p. 193.
340 G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney: Zapiski russkogo evreya [Affairs of the Past: the
Notes of a Russian Jew] (henceforthG.B. Sliozberg): V 3 T. Paris, 1933-1934. T 1, p. 95.
341 EE*, T 11, p. 495.
342 L. Deych. Rol evreyev v russkom revolyutsionnom dvizhenii [The Role of the Jews in the
Russian Revolutionary Movement]. T 1. Second Edition. Moscow,; Leningrad.: GIZ, 1925,
recollects his revolutionary duty and calls everything given to the Jews during
the reign of Alexander I as, in essence, insignificant alleviations and, without
losing a beat, mentions the crimes of Alexander II although, in his opinion,
the Tsar shouldnt have been killed.343 And from the middle of the 20th century
it already looks like for the whole of 19th century that various committees and
commissions were being created for review of Jewish legal restrictions and
they came to the conclusion that the existing legal restrictions did not achieve
their aims and should be abolished. Yet not a single one of the projects
worked out by the Committees was implemented.344
Its rid of, forgotten, and no toasts made.
After the first Jewish reforms by Alexander II, the existence of the Pale of
Settlement had become the most painful issue. Once a hope about a possibility
of future state reforms had emerged, and first harbingers of expected renewal of
public life had barely appeared, the Jewish intelligentsia began contemplating
the daring step of raising the question of abolishing the Jewish Pale of
Settlement altogether.345 Yet still fresh in the Jewish memory was the idea of
selectivity: to impose additional obligations on not-permanently-settled and
unproductive Jews. And so in 1856 an idea to petition His Majesty appeared in
the social strata of Jewish merchants, citizens of St. Petersburg, and out-of-
towners, who by their social standing and by the nature of their activity, more
closely interacted with the central authorities. 346 The petition asked His
Majesty not to give privileges to the whole Jewish population, but only to
certain categories, to the young generation raised in the spirit and under the
supervision of the government, to the upper merchant class, and to the good
craftsmen, who earn their bread by sweat of their brow; so that they would be
distinguished by the government with more rights than those who still
exhibited nothing special about their good intentions, usefulness, and
industriousness. Our petition is so that the Merciful Monarch, distinguishing
wheat from chaff, would be kindly disposed to grant several, however modest
privileges to the worthy and cultivated among us, thus encouraging good and
praiseworthy actions.347 (Even in all their excited hopes they could not even
imagine how quickly the changes in the position of the Jews would be
implemented in practice already in 1862 some of the authors of this petition
would ask about extending equal rights to all who graduate from secondary

p. 14, 21-22.
343 Ibid. p. 28.
344 A.A. Galdenveyzer. Pravovoe polozhenie evreyev v Rossii // [Sb.] Kniga o russkom
evreystve: Ot 1860-kh godov do Revolyutsii 1917g [The Legal Position of the Jews in
Russia // [Anthology] The Book of Russian Jewry: from the 1860s to the Revolution of
1917]. (henceforthKRE-1). New York: Soyuz Russkikh Evreyev [Union of Russian Jews],
1960, p. 119.
345 Yu Gessen. T 2, p. 143.
346 EE [JE], T 1, p. 813.
347 Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 144-145; EE [JE] T 1, p. 813.
educational institutions, for the grammar school graduates of course, must be
considered people with a European education.348
And yes, in principle, the Tsar did not mind violations of the laws
concerning the Jewish Pale of Settlement in favor of individual groups of the
Jewish population. In 1859 Jewish merchants of the 1st Guild were granted the
right of residency in all of Russia (and the 2nd Guild in Kiev from 1861; and
also for all three guilds in Nikolayev, Sevastopol, and Yalta) 349 with the right of
arranging manufacturing businesses, contracts, and acquiring real estate. Earlier,
doctors and holders of masters degrees in science had already enjoyed the right
of universal residency (including the right to occupy posts in government
service; here we should note a professor of medicine G.A. Zakharyin, who in
the future would pronounce the fatal judgment about the illness of Alexander
III). From 1861 this right was granted to candidates of universities, that is,
simply to university graduates,350 and also to persons of free professions. 351
The Pale of Settlement restrictions were now lifted even from the persons,
desiring to obtain higher education namely to persons, entering medical
academies, universities, and technical institutes.352 Then, as a result of petitions
from individual ministers, governors, and influential Jewish merchants (e.g.,
Evzel Ginzburg), from 1865 the whole territory of Russia including St.
Petersburg was opened to Jewish artisans, though only for the period of actual
professional activity. (The notion of artisans was then widened to include all
kinds of technicians such as typesetters and typographic workers.)353
Here it is worth keeping in mind that merchants relocated with their clerks,
office workers, various assistants, and Jewish service personnel, craftsmen, and
also with apprentices and pupils. Taken altogether, this already made up a
notable stream. Thus, a Jew with a right of residency outside of the Pale was
free to move from the Pale, and not only with his family.
Yet new relaxations were outpaced by new petitions. In 1861, immediately
after granting privileges for the candidates of universities, the Governor
General of the Southwestern Krai had asked to allow exit from the Pale to those
who completed state professional schools for the Jews, that is, incomplete high
school-level establishments. He had vividly described the condition of such
graduates: Young people graduating from such schools find themselves
completely cut off from Jewish society. If they do not find occupations
according to their qualifications within their own circles, they get accustomed to
idleness and thus, by being unworthy representatives of their profession, they
often discredit the prestige of education in the eyes of people they live
among.354

348 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 158.

349 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 144, 154-155.
350 EE [JE], T 1, p. 817.
351 KEE [SJE], T 4, p. 255.
352 Sm.: M. Kovalevskiy // Shchit, p. 118.
353 EE [JE], T 1, p. 818; T 11, p. 458-459; T 14, p. 841.
354 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 150.
 In that same year, the Ministers of Internal Affairs and Education declared
in unison that a paramount cause of the disastrous condition of Jews is hidden
in the abnormal share of Jews occupied in commerce and industry versus the
rest engaged in agriculture; and because of this the peasant is unavoidably
preyed upon by Jews as if he is obligated to surrender a part of his income to
their maintenance. Yet the internal competition between the Jews creates a
nearly impossible situation of providing for themselves by legal means. And
therefore, it is necessary to grant the right of universal residence to merchants
of the 2nd and 3rd Guilds, and also to graduates of high or equivalent schools.355
In 1862 the Novorossiysk Governor General again called for complete
abolition of the Jewish Pale of Settlement by asking to grant the right of
universal residency to the entire [Jewish] people.356
Targeted permissions for universal residency of certain Jewish groups were
being issued at a slower but constant rate. From 1865 acceptance of Jews as
military doctors was permitted, and right after that (1866-1867), Jewish doctors
were allowed to work in the ministries of Education and Interior. 357 From 1879
they were permitted to serve as pharmacists and veterinarians; permission was
also granted to those preparing for the corresponding type of activity,358 and
also to midwives and feldshers, and those desiring to study medical assistant
arts.359
Finally, a decree by the Minister of Internal Affairs Makov was issued
allowing residence outside the Pale to all those Jews who had already illegally
settled there.360
Here it is appropriate to add that in the 1860s Jewish lawyers in the
absence of the official Bar College during that period were able to get jobs in
government service without any difficulties.361
Relaxations had also affected the Jews living in border regions. In 1856,
when, according to the Treaty of Paris, the Russian state boundary retreated
close to Kishinev and Akkerman, the Jews were not forced out of this newly-
formed frontier zone. And in 1858 the decrees of Nicholas I, which directed
Jews to abandon the fifty versts [an obsolete Russian measure, a verst is slightly
more than a kilometer] boundary zone, were conclusively repealed.362 And
from 1868 movement of Jews between the western provinces of Russia and
Polish Kingdom was allowed (where previously it was formally prohibited).363

355 Ibid*, p. 148.

356 Ibid, p. 150.
357 Ibid. p. 169.
358 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 208.
359 EE [JE], T 15, p. 209; T 1, p. 824.
360 Perezhitoe: Sbornik, posvyashchenniy obshchestvennoy i kulturnoy istorii evreyev v Rossii
[Past Experiences: An Anthology Dedicated to the Social and Cultural History of the Jews
in Russia]. T 2, Sankt-St. Petersburg, 1910, p. 102.
361 G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 137.
362 KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 327.
363 EE [JE], T 1, p. 819.
 Alongside official relaxations to the legal restrictions, there were also
exceptions and loopholes in regulations. For example, in the capital city of St.
Petersburg despite prohibitions, the Jews all the same settled in for
extended times; and with the ascension of Alexander II the number of Jews
in St. Petersburg began to grow quickly. Jewish capitalists emerged who began
dedicating significant attention to the organization of the Jewish community
there; Baron Goratsy Ginzburg, for example L. Rozental, A Varshavsky, and
others.364 Toward the end of Alexander IIs reign, E. A. Peretz (the son of the
tax farmer Abram Peretz) became the Russian Secretary of State. In the 1860s
St. Petersburg started to attract quite a few members of the commercial,
industrial and intellectual [circles] of Jewry.365
According to the data of the Commission for Arranging the Jewish Way of
Life, in 1880-81, 6,290 Jews were officially registered in St. Petersburg,366 while
according to other official figures, 8,993; and according to a local census from
1881, there were 16,826 Jews in St. Petersburg, i.e., around 2% of the total city
population.367
In Moscow in 1856 the obligation of arriving Jewish merchants to
exclusively reside in the Glebovsky Quarter was repealed; the Jews were
allowed to stay in any part of the city. During the reign of Alexander II the
Jewish population of Moscow grew quickly; by 1880 it was around 16,000.368
It was a similar situation in Kiev. After 1861, a quick growth of the Jewish
population of Kiev had began (from 1,500 in 1862, to 81,000 by 1913). From
the 1880s there was an influx of Jews to Kiev. Despite frequent police round-
ups, which Kiev was famous for, the numbers of Jews there considerably
exceeded the official figures. By the end of the 19th century, the Jews
accounted for 44% of Kiev merchants.369
Yu. I. Hessen calls the granting of the right of universal residency (1865)
to artisans most important. Yet Jews apparently did not hurry to move out of
the Pale. Well, if it was so overcrowded in there, so constraining, and so
deprived with respect to markets and earnings, why then did they make almost
no use of the right to leave the Pale of Settlement? By 1881, in thirty-one of
the interior provinces, Jewish artisans numbered 28,000 altogether (and Jews in
general numbered 34,000). Hessen explains this paradox in the following way:
prosperous artisans did not need to seek new places while the destitute did not
have the means for the move, and the middle group, which somehow managed
from day to day without enduring any particular poverty, feared that after their
departure the elders of their community would refuse to extend an annual

364 Also, T 13, p. 943-944.

365 I.M. Trotskiy. Samodeyatelnost i samopomoshch evreyev v Rossii [The Individual Initiative
and Self-Help of the Jews in Russia] (OPE, ORT, EKO, OZE, EKOPO) // KRE-1, p. 471.
366 Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 210.
367 EE [JE], T 13, p. 947; KEE [SJE], T 4, p. 770.
368 KEE [SJE], T 5, p. 473.
369 Also, T 4, p. 255.
passport to them for tax considerations, or even demand that the outgoing
parties return home.370
But one can strongly doubt all this statistics. We have just read that in St.
Petersburg alone there were at least twice as many Jews than according to
official data. Could the slow Russian state apparatus really account for the
mercury-quick Jewish population within a definite time and in all places?
And the growth of Jewish population of Russia was rapid and confident. In
1864 it amounted to 1,500,000 without counting Jews in Poland. 371 And
together with Poland in 1850 it was 2,350,000; and in 1860 it was already
3,980,000. From the initial population of around 1,000,000 at the time of the
first partitions of Poland, to 5,175,000 by the census of 1897 that is, after a
century, it grew more than five times. (At the start of the 19th century Russian
Jewry amounted to 30% of the worlds Jewish population, while in 1880 it was
already 51%).372
This was a major historical event.At the time, its significance was grasped
neither by Russian society, nor by Russian administration.
This fast numerical growth alone, without all other peculiarities of the
Jewish Question, had already put a huge state problem for Russia. And here it is
necessary, as always in any question, to try to understand both points of view.
With such an enormous growth of Russian Jewry, two national needs were
clashing ever more strongly. On one hand was the need of Jews (and a distinct
feature of their dynamic 3,000-year existence) to spread and settle as wide as
possible among non-Jews, so that a greater number of Jews would be able to
engage in manufacturing, commerce, and serve as intermediaries (and to get
involved into the culture of the surrounding population). On the other was the
need of Russians, as the government understood it, to have control over their
economic (and then cultural) life, and develop it themselves at their own pace.
Lets not forget that simultaneously with all these relief measures for the
Jews, the universal liberating reforms of Alexander II were implemented one
after another, and so benefiting Jews as well as all other peoples of Russia. For
example, in 1863 the capitation [i.e., poll or head] tax from the urban
population was repealed, which meant the tax relief for the main part of Jewish
masses; only land taxes remained after that, which were paid from the collected
kosher tax.373
Yet precisely the most important of these Alexandrian reforms, the most
historically significant turning point in the Russian history the liberation of
peasants and the abolition of the Serfdom in 1861 turned out to be highly
unprofitable for Russian Jews, and indeed ruinous for many. The general social
and economic changes resulting from the abolition of peasant servitude had
significantly worsened the material situation of broad Jewish masses during that
370 Yu Gessen. T 2, p. 159-160, 210.
371 Also, p. 159.
372 B.Ts. Dinur. Religiozno-natsionalniy oblik russkogo evreystva [The Religious-National
Look of Russian Jewry] // KRE-1, p. 311-312.
373 EE [JE], T 12, p. 640.
transitional period.374 The social change was such that the multi-million
disenfranchised and immobile peasant class ceased to exist, reducing the
relative advantage of Jewish personal freedom. And the economic change was
such that the peasant, liberated from the servitude, was less in the need of
services by the Jew; that is, the peasant was now at liberty from the strict
prohibition against trading his products and purchasing goods himself that is,
through anyone other than a pre-assigned middleman (in the western provinces,
almost always a Jew). And now, as the landowners were deprived of free serf
labor, in order not to be ruined, they were compelled to get personally engaged
in the economy of their estates an occupation where earlier Jews played a
conspicuous role as renters and middlemen in all kinds of commercial and
manufacturing deals.375
Its noteworthy that the land credit introduced in those years was displacing
the Jew as the financial manager of the manorial economy. 376 The
development of consumer and credit associations led to the liberation of
people from the tyranny of usury.377
An intelligent contemporary conveys to us the Jewish mood of the time.
Although access to government service and free professions was open to the
Jews and although the industrial rights of the Jews were broadened and there
were more opportunities for education and on every corner the
rapprochement between the Jewish and Christian populations was visible and
although the remaining restrictions were far from being strictly enforced
and the officials now treated the Jewish population with far more respect than
before, yet the situation of Jews in Russia at the present time is very
dismal. Not without reason, Jews express regret for good old times.
Everywhere in the Pale of Settlement one could hear the Jewish lamentations
about the past. For under serfdom an extraordinary development of
mediation took place; the lazy landowner could not take a step without the
Jewish trader or agent, and the browbeaten peasant also could not manage
without him; he could only sell the harvest through him, and borrowed from
him also. Before, the Jewish business class derived enormous benefit from the
helplessness, wastefulness, and impracticality of landowners, but now the
landowner had to do everything himself. Also, the peasant became less pliant
and timid; now he often establishes contacts with wholesale traders himself
and he drinks less; and this naturally has a harmful effect on the trade in spirits,
which an enormous number of Jews lives on. The author concludes with the
wish that the Jews, as happened in Europe, would side with the productive
classes and would not become redundant in the national economy.378
Now Jews had begun renting and purchasing land. The Novorossiysk
Governor General (1869) requested in a staff report to forbid Jews in his region
374 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 161.
375 Also.
376 Also.
377 Yu. Orshanskiy, p. 12.
378 I. Orshanskiy, p. 1-15.
to buy land as was already prohibited in nine western provinces. Then in 1872
there was a memorandum by the Governor General of the Southwestern Krai
stating that Jews rent land not for agricultural occupations but only for
industrial aims; they hand over the rented land to peasants, not for money but
for a certain amount of work, which exceeds the value of the usual rent on that
land, and thereby they establish a sort of their own form of servitude. And
though they undoubtedly reinvigorate the countryside with their capital and
commerce, the Governor General considered concentration of manufacture
and agriculture in the same hands un-conducive, since only under free
competition can peasant farms and businesses avoid the burdensome
subordination of their work and land to Jewish capital, which is tantamount to
their inevitable and impending material and moral perdition. However,
thinking to limit the renting of land to Jews in his Krai, he proposed to give the
Jews an opportunity to settle in all of the Greater Russian provinces.379
The memorandum was put forward to the just-created Commission for
Arranging the Jewish Way of Life (the eighth of the Jewish Commissions,
according to count), which was then highly sympathetic to the situation of the
Jews. It received a negative review which was later confirmed by the
government: to forbid the Jewish rent of land would be a complete violation of
rights of landowners. Moreover, the interests of the major Jewish renter
merge completely with those of other landowners. Well, it is true, that the
Jewish proletarians group around the major [Jewish] renters and live off the
work and means of the rural population. But the same also happens in the
estates managed by the landowners themselves who to this time cannot manage
without the help of the Jews.380
However, in the areas inhabited by the Don Cossacks, the energetic
economic advancement of the Jews was restricted by the prohibition of 1880 to
own or rent the real estate. The provincial government found that in view of
the exclusive situation of the Don Province, the Cossack population which is
obligated to military service to a man, [this] is the only reliable way to save the
Cossack economy from ruin, to secure the nascent manufacturing and
commerce in the area. For a too hasty exploitation of a regions wealth and
quick development of industry are usually accompanied by an extremely
uneven distribution of capital, and the swift enrichment of some and the
impoverishment of others. Meanwhile, the Cossacks must prosper, since they
carry out their military service on their own horses and with their own
equipment.381 And thus they had prevented a possible Cossack explosion.
So what happened with the conscription of Jews into military service after
all those Alexandrian relief measures of 1856? For the 1860s, this was the
picture: When Jews manage to find out about the impending Imperial Manifest
about recruit enrollment before it is officially published all members of

379 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 224-225.

380 EE [JE], T 3, p. 83-84.
381 EE* [JE], T 7, p. 301-302.
Jewish families fit for military service flee from their homes in all
directions. Because of the peculiarities of their faith and lack of
comradeship and the perpetual isolation of the Jewish soldier the military
service for the Jews was the most threatening, the most ruinous, and the most
burdensome of duties.382 Although from 1860 the Jewish service in the Guards
was permitted, and from 1861promotions to petty officer ranks and service as
clerks,383 there was still no access to officer ranks.
I. G. Orshansky, a witness to the 1860s, certifies: It is true, there is much
data supporting the opinion that in the recent years the Jews in fact had not
fulfilled their conscription obligations number-wise. They purchase old recruit
discharges and present them to the authorities; peasants sometimes keep them
without knowing their value as far back as from 1812; so now Jewish
resourcefulness puts them to use. Or, they hire volunteers in place of
themselves and pay a certain sum to the treasury. Also they try to divide their
families into smaller units, and by this each family claims the privilege of the
only son, (the only son was exempt from the military service). Yet, he notes
all the tricks for avoiding recruitment are similarly encountered among the
pure-blooded Russians and provides comparative figures for Ekaterinoslav
Guberniya. I. G. Orshansky had even expressed surprise that Russian peasants
prefer to return to the favorite occupation of the Russian people, farming,
instead of wanting to remain in the highly-paid military service.384
In 1874 a unified regulation about universal military service had replaced
the old recruit conscription obligation giving the Jews a significant relief.
The text of the regulation did not contain any articles that discriminated
against Jews.385 However, now Jews were not permitted to remain in residence
in the interior provinces after completion of military service. Also, special
regulations aimed to specify the figure of male Jewish population were
introduced, for to that day it largely remained undetermined and unaccounted.
The governors received information about abuses of law by Jews wishing to
evade military service386. In 1876 the first measures for ensuring the proper
fulfillment of military duty by Jews387 were adopted. The Jewish Encyclopedia
saw a heavy net of repressive measures in them. Regulations were issued
about the registration of Jews at conscription districts and about the replacement
of Jews not fit for service by Jews who were fit; and about verification of the
validity of exemptions for family conditions: for violation of these regulations
conscription of only sons was permitted.388
A contemporary and then influential St. Petersburg newspaper, Golos [The
Voice] cites quite amazing figures from the official governmental Report on the

382 G.B. Sliozberg, T 2, p. 155-156.

383 EE [JE], T 3, p. 164.
384 I. Orshanskiy, p. 65-68.
385 KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 332.
386 EE [JE], T 1, p. 824.
387 Also*, T 3, p. 164.
388 Also, T 1, p. 824; KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 332.
Results of Conscription in 1880. For all [of the Russian Empire] the shortfall
of recruits was 3,309; out of this, the shortfall of Jews was 3,054, which
amounts to 92%.389
Shmakov, a prominent attorney, not well-disposed toward Jews, cites such
statistics from the reference, Pravitelstvenniy Vestnik [The Government
Bulletin]: for the period 1876-1883: out of 282,466 Jews subject to
conscription, 89,105 that is, 31.6% did not show up. (The general
shortfall for the whole Empire was 0.19%.) The Administration could not help
but notice this, and a number of steps toward the elimination of such abuse
were introduced. This had an effect, but only short-term. In 1889 46,190 Jews
were subjected to call-up, and 4,255 did not appear, that is 9.2%. But in 1891
from a general number of 51,248 Jews recorded on the draft list, 7,658, or
14.94%, failed to report; at that time the percentage of Christians not reporting
was barely 2.67%. In 1892, 16.38% of Jews failed to report as compared with
3.18% of Christians. In 1894 6,289 Jews did not report for the draft, that is,
13.6%. Compare this to the Russian average of 2.6%.390
However, the same document on the 1894 draft states that in total,
873,143 Christians, 45,801 Jews, 27,424 Mohammedans, and 1,311 Pagans
were to be drafted. These are striking figures in Russia, there were 8.7%
Muslims (according to the 1870 count) but their share in the draft was only
2.9%! The Jews were in an unfavorable position not only in comparison with
the Mohammedans but with the general population too: their share of the draft
was assigned 4.8% though they constituted only 3.2% of Russian population (in
1870). (The Christian share in the draft was 92% (87% of Russian
population).391
From everything said here one should not conclude that at the time of the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, Jewish soldiers did not display courage and
resourcefulness during combat. In the journal Russkiy Evrei [The Russian Jew]
we can find convincing examples of both virtues.392 Yet during that war much
irritation against Jews arose in the army, mainly because of dishonest
contractor-quartermasters and such were almost exclusively Jews, starting
with the main contractors of the Horovits, Greger, and Kagan Company.393 The
quartermasters supplied (undoubtedly under protection of higher circles)
overpriced poor-quality equipment including the famous cardboard soles, due
to which the feet of Russian soldiers fighting in the Shipka Pass were
frostbitten.

389 Golos [The Voice], 1881, No46, 15 (27) February, p. 1.

390 A. Shmakov. Evreyskie rechi [Jewish Questions]. Moscow, 1897, p. 101-103.
391 Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar [Encyclopedic Dictionary]: V 82 T. Sankt-St. Petersburg.:
Brokgauz i Efron, 1890-1904. T 54, p. 86.
392 EE [JE], T 3, p. 164-167.
393 G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 116.
In the Age of Alexander II, the half-century-old official drive to accustom the
Jews to agriculture was ending in failure.
After the repeal of disproportionate Jewish recruitment, farming had
immediately lost all its appeal for Jews, or, in words of one government
official, a false interpretation of the Manifest by them had occurred,
according to which they now considered themselves free of the obligation to
engage in farming, and that they could now migrate freely. The petitions from
the Jews about resettling with the intent to work in agriculture had ended almost
completely.394
Conditions in the existing colonies remained the same if not worse: fields
were plowed and sowed pathetically, just for a laugh, or for appearances
sake only. For instance, in 1859 the grain yield in several colonies was even
smaller than the amount sown. In the new paradigmatic colonies, not only
barns were lacking, there was even no overhangs or pens for livestock. The
Jewish colonists leased most of their land to others, to local peasants or German
colonists. Many asked permission to hire Christians as workers, otherwise
threatening to cut back on sowing even further and they were granted such a
right, regardless of the size of the actual crop.395
Of course, there were affluent Jewish farmers among the colonists. Arrival
of German colonists was very helpful too as their experience could now be
adopted by Jews. And the young generation born there was already more
accepting toward agriculture and German experience; they were more
convinced in the advantageousness of farming in comparison to their previous
life in the congestion and exasperating competition of shtetls and towns.396
Yet the incomparably larger majority was trying to get away from
agriculture. Gradually, inspectors reports became invariably monotonic: What
strikes most is the general Jewish dislike for farm work and their regrets about
their former artisan occupations, trade, and business; they displayed tireless
zeal in any business opportunity, for example, at the very high point of field
work they could leave the fields if they discovered that they could profitably
buy or sell a horse, an ox, or something else, in the vicinity. [They had] a
predilection for penny-wise trade, demanding, according to their conviction,
less work and giving more means for living. Making money was easier for
Jews in nearby German, Russian, or Greek villages, where the Jewish colonist
would engage in tavern-keeping and small trade. Yet more damaging for the
arable land were long absences of the workers who left the area for distant
places, leaving only one or two family members at home in the colonies, while
the rest went to earn money in brokerages. In the 1860s (a half-century after the
founding of colonies) such departure was permitted for the entire families or
many family members simultaneously; in the colonies quite a few people were
listed who had never lived there. After leaving the colonies, they often evaded

394 V.N. Nikitin*, p. 448, 483, 529.

395 Also*, p 473, 490, 501, 506-507, 530-531, 537-538, 547-548, 667.
396 Also, p. 474-475, 502, 547.
registering with their trade guild in the new place, and many stayed there for
several consecutive years, with family, unregistered to any guild, and thus not
subject to any kind of tax or obligation. And in the colonies, the houses built
for them stood empty, and fell into disrepair. In 1861, Jews were permitted to
maintain drinking houses in the colonies.397
Finally, the situation regarding Jewish agriculture had dawned on the St.
Petersburg authorities in all its stark and dismal reality. Back taxes (forgiven on
numerous occasions, such as an imperial marriage) grew, and each amnesty had
encouraged Jews not to pay taxes or repay loans from now on. (In 1857, when
the ten years granted to collect past due taxes had expired, five additional years
were added. But even in 1863 the debt was still not collected.) So what was all
that resettling, privileges and loans for? On the one hand, the whole 60-year
epic project had temporarily provided Jews with means of avoiding their duties
before the state while at the same time failing to instill love for agriculture
among the colonists. The ends were not worthy of the means. On the other
hand, simply a permission to live outside of the Pale, even without any
privileges, attracted a huge number of Jewish farmers who stopped at nothing
to get there.398
If in 1858 there were officially 64,000 Jewish colonists, that is, eight to ten
thousand families, then by 1880 the Ministry had found only 14,000, that is, less
than two thousand families.399 For example, in the whole Southwestern Krai in
1872 the commission responsible for verifying whether or not the land is in use
or lay unattended had found fewer than 800 families of Jewish colonists.400
Russian authorities had clearly seen now that the entire affair of turning
Jews into farmers had failed. They no longer believed that their cherished hope
for the prosperity of colonies could be realized. It was particularly difficult for
the Minister Kiselyov to part with this dream, but he retired in 1856. Official
documents admitted failure, one after another: resettlement of the Jews for
agricultural occupation has not been accompanied by favorable results.
Meanwhile enormous areas of rich productive black topsoil remain in the
hands of the Jews unexploited. After all, the best soil was selected and
reserved for Jewish colonization. That portion, which was temporarily rented to
those willing, gave a large income (Jewish colonies lived off it) as the
population in the South grew and everyone asked for land. And now even the
worst land from the reserve, beyond that allotted for Jewish colonization, had
also quickly risen in value.401 The Novorossiysk Krai had already absorbed
many active settlers and no longer needed any state-promoted colonization.402
So the Jewish colonization had become irrelevant for state purposes.

397 V.N. Nikitin*, p. 502-505, 519, 542, 558, 632, 656, 667.
398 Also*, p. 473, 510, 514, 529-533, 550, 572.
399 Also, p. 447, 647.
400 EE [JE], T 7, p. 756.
401 V.N. Nikitin*, p. 478-479, 524, 529-533, 550-551.
402 EE [JE], T 7, p. 756.
 And in 1866 Alexander II had ordered and end to the enforcement of
several laws aimed at turning Jews into farmers. Now the task was to equalize
Jewish farmers with the rest of the farmers of the Empire. Everywhere, Jewish
colonies turned out to be incapable of independent existence in the new free
situation. So now it was necessary to provide legal means for Jews to abandon
agriculture, even individually and not in whole families (1868), so they could
become artisans and merchants. They had been permitted to redeem their
parcels of land; and so they redeemed and resold their land at a profit.403
However, in the dispute over various projects in the Ministry of State
Property, the question about the reform of Jewish colonies dragged out and even
stopped altogether by 1880. In the meantime with a new recruit statute of 1874,
Jews were stripped of their recruiting privileges, and with that any vestiges of
their interest in farming were conclusively lost. By 1881 in the colonies there
was a preponderance of farmsteads with only one apartment house, around
which there were no signs of settlement; that is, no fence, no housing for
livestock, no farm buildings, no beds for vegetables, nor even a single tree or
shrub; there were very few exceptions.404
The state councilor Ivashintsev, an official with 40 years experience in
agriculture, was sent in 1880 to investigate the situation with the colonies. He
had reported that in all of Russia no other peasant community enjoyed such
generous benefits as had been given [to Jews] and these benefits were not a
secret from other peasants, and could not help but arouse hostile feelings in
them. Peasants adjacent to the Jewish colonies were indignant because
due to a shortage of land they had to rent the land from Jews for an expensive
price, the land which was given cheaply to the Jews by the state in amounts in
fact exceeding the actual Jewish needs. It was namely this circumstance which
in part explained the hostility of peasants toward Jewish farmers, which
manifested itself in the destruction of several Jewish settlements (in 1881-
82).405
In those years, there were commissions allotting land to peasants from the
excess land of the Jewish settlements. Unused or neglected sectors were taken
back by the government. In Volynsk, Podolsk, and Kiev guberniyas, out of
39,000 desyatins [one desyatin = 2.7 acres] only 4,082 remained [under Jewish
cultivation].406 Yet several quite extensive Jewish farming settlements
remained: Yakshitsa in the Minsk Guberniya, not known for its rich land, had
740 desyatins for 46 [Jewish] families;407 that is, an average of 16 desyatins per
family, something you will rarely find among peasants in Central Russia; in
1848 in Annengof of Mogilyov Guberniya, also not vast in land, twenty Jewish
families received 20 desyatins of state land each, but by 1872 it was discovered
that there were only ten families remaining, and a large part of the land was not
403 V.N. Nikitin, p. 534, 540, 555, 571, 611-616, 659.
404 V.N. Nikitin, p. 635, 660-666.
405 Also*, p. 658-661.
406 EE [JE], T 7, p. 756.
407 Also, T 16, p. 399.
cultivated and was choked with weeds.408 In Vishenki of Mogilyov Guberniya,
they had 16 desyatins per family;409 and in Ordynovshchina of Grodno
Guberniya 12 desyatins per [Jewish] family. In the more spacious southern
guberniyas in the original settlements there remained: 17 desyatins per [Jewish]
family in Bolshoi Nagartav; 16 desyatins per [Jewish] family in Seidemenukh;
and 17 desyatins per family in Novo-Berislav. In the settlement of Roskoshnaya
in Ekaterinoslav Guberniya they had 15 desyatins per family, but if total colony
land is considered, then 42 desyatins per family.410 In Veselaya (by 1897) there
were 28 desyatins per family. In Sagaidak, there were 9 desyatins, which was
considered a small allotment.411 And in Kiev Provinces Elyuvka, there were 6
Jewish families with 400 desyatins among them, or 67 desyatins per family!
And land was rented to the Germans.412
Yet from a Soviet author of the 1920s we read a categorical statement that
Tsarism had almost completely forbidden the Jews to engage in agriculture.413
On the pages which summarize his painstaking work, the researcher of
Jewish agriculture V. N. Nikitin concludes: The reproaches against the Jews
for having poor diligence in farming, for leaving without official permission for
the cities to engage in commercial and artisan occupations, are entirely justified
.We by no means deny the Jewish responsibility for such a small number of
them actually working in agriculture after the last 80 years. Yet he puts forward
several excuses for them: [The authorities] had no faith in Jews; the rules of
the colonization were changed repeatedly; sometimes officials who knew
nothing about agriculture or who were completely indifferent to Jews were sent
to regulate their lives. Jews who used to be independent city dwellers were
transformed into villagers without any preparation for life in the country.414
At around the same time, in 1884, N. S. Leskov, in a memorandum
intended for yet another governmental commission on Jewish affairs headed by
Palen, had suggested that the Jewish lack of habituation to agricultural living
had developed over generations and that it is so strong, that it is equal to the
loss of ability in farming, and that the Jew would not become a plowman again
unless the habit is revived gradually.415
(Lev Tolstoy had allegedly pondered: who are those confining the entire
nation to the squeeze of city life, and not giving it a chance to settle on the land
and begin to do the only natural mans occupation, farming. After all, its the
same as not to give the people air to breathe. Whats wrong with Jews

408 Also, T 2, p. 596.

409 Also, T 5, p. 650.
410 Also, T 13, p. 606.
411 Also, T 5, p. 518; T 13, p. 808.
412 Also, T 16, p. 251.
413 Yu Larin. Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR [The Jews and Antisemitism in the USSR], p. 36.
414 V.N. Nikitin, p. xii-xiii.
415 N.S. Leskov. Evrei v Rossii: Neskolko zamechaniy po evreyskomu voprosu [The Jews in
Russia: Several Observations on the Jewish Question]. Pg., 1919 [reprint s izd. 1884], p. 61,
63.
settling in villages and starting to live a pure working life, which, probably, this
ancient, intelligent, and wonderful people has already yearned for? 416 On
what planet was he living? What did he know about the 80 years of practical
experience with [Jewish] agricultural colonization?)
And yet the experience of the development of Palestine where the Jewish
settlers felt themselves at home had showed their excellent ability to work the
land; moreover, they did it in conditions much more unfavorable than in
Novorossiya. Still, all the attempts to persuade or compel the Jews toward
arable farming in Russia (and afterwards in the USSR) had failed (and from that
came the degrading legend that the Jews in general are incapable of farming).
And thus, after 80 years of effort by the Russian government it turned out
that all that agricultural colonization was a grandiose but empty affair; all the
effort, all the massive expenditures, the delay of the development of
Novorossiya all were for nothing. The resulting experience shows that it
shouldnt have been undertaken at all.

Generally examining Jewish commercial and industrial entrepreneurship, I. G.

Orshansky justly wrote at the start of the 1870s that the question about Jewish
business activity is the essence of the Jewish Question, on which fate of
Jewish people in any country depends. [An entrepreneur] from the quick,
mercantile, resourceful Jewish tribe turns over a ruble five times while a
Russian turns it two times. There is stagnation, drowsiness, and monopoly
among the Russian merchants. (For example, after the expulsion of the Jews
from Kiev, life there had become more expensive). The strong side of Jewish
participation in commercial life lies in the acceleration of capital turnover, even
of the most insignificant working capital. Debunking the opinion, that so-called
Jewish corporate spirit gives them a crucial advantage in any competition, that
Jewish [merchants] always support each other, having their bankers,
contractors, and carriers, Orshansky attributed the Jewish corporate spirit only
to social and religious matters, and not to commerce, where, he claimed, Jews
fiercely compete against each other (which is in contradiction with the Hazaka
prescribing separation of spheres of activity, which, according to him, had
gradually disappeared following the change in legal standing of Jews417). He
had also contested the opinion that any Jewish trade does not enrich the country,
that it exclusively consists of exploitation of the productive and working
classes, and that the profit of the Jews is a pure loss for the nation. He
disagreed, suggesting that Jews constantly look for and find new sales markets

416 L.N. Tolstoy o evreyakh / Predisl. O.Ya. Pergamenta [L.N. Tolstoy on the Jews / Foreword
O.Ya. Pergamenta], Sankt-PeterburgSt. Petersburg.: Vremya [Time], 1908, p. 15.
417 EE [JE], T 15, p. 492.
and thereby open new sources of earnings for the poor Christian population as
well.418
Jewish commercial and industrial entrepreneurship in Russia had quickly
recovered from the two noticeable blows of 1861, the abolition of serfdom and
the abolition of wine farming. The financial role of Jews had become
particularly significant by the 1860s, when previous activities amassed capital
in their hands, while liberation of peasants and the associated impoverishment
of landowners created a huge demand for money on the part of landowners
statewide. Jewish capitalists played a prominent role in organization of land
banks.419 The whole economic life of the country quickly changed in many
directions and the invariable Jewish determination, inventiveness, and capital
were keeping pace with the changes and were even ahead of them. Jewish
capital flowed, for example, to the sugar industry of the Southwest (so that in
1872 one fourth of all sugar factories had a Jewish owner, as well as one third
of joint-stock sugar companies),420 and to the flour-milling and other factory
industries both in the Pale of Settlement and outside. After the Crimean War an
intensive construction of railroads was underway; all kinds of industrial and
commercial enterprises, joint stock companies and banks arose and many
Jews found wide application for their strengths and talents in those
undertakings with a few of them getting very rich incredibly fast.421
Jews were involved in the grain business for a long time but their role had
become particularly significant after the peasant liberation and from the
beginning of large-scale railroad construction. Already in 1878, 60% of grain
export was in the hands of Jews and afterwards it was almost completely
controlled by Jews. And thanks to Jewish industrialists, lumber had become
the second most important article of Russian export (after grain). Woodcutting
contracts and the acquisition of forest estates by Jews were not prohibited since
1835. The lumber industry and timber trade were developed by Jews. Also,
Jews had established timber export. The timber trade is a major aspect of
Jewish commerce, and, at the same time, a major area of concentration of
capital. Intensive growth of the Jewish timber trade began in the 1860-1870s,
when as a result of the abolition of serfdom, landowners unloaded a great
number of estates and forests on the market. The 1870s were the years of the
first massive surge of Jews into industries such as manufacturing, flax,
foodstuff, leather, cabinetry, and furniture industries, while tobacco industry
had long since been concentrated in the hands of Jews.422
In the words of Jewish authors: In the epoch of Alexander II, the wealthy
Jewish bourgeoisie was completely loyal to the monarchy. The great

418 I. Orshanskiy, p. 71-72, 95-98, 106-107, 158-160.

419 EE [JE], T 13, p. 646.
420 I.M. Dizhur. Evrei v ekonomicheskoy zhizni Rossii [The Jews in the Economic Life of
Russia] // KRE-1, p. 168; EE [JE], T 13, p.662.
421 L. Deych. Rol evreyev[The Role of the Jews..], T 1, p. 14-15.
422 EE [JE], T 13, p. 647, 656-658, 663-664; G.B. Sliozberg, T 3, p. 93; KEE [SJE], T 7, p.
337.
wealth of the Gintsburgs, the Polyakovs, the Brodskys, the Zaitsevs, the
Balakhovskys, and the Ashkenazis was amassed exactly at that time. As
already mentioned, the tax-farmer Evzel Gintsburg had founded his own bank
in St. Petersburg. Samuil Polyakov had built six railroad lines; the three
Polyakov brothers were granted hereditary nobility titles. 423 Thanks to railroad
construction, which was guaranteed and to a large extent subsidized by the
government, the prominent capital of the Polyakovs, I. Bliokh, A. Varshavsky
and others were created. Needless to say, many more smaller fortunes were
made as well, such as that of A. I. Zaks, the former assistant to E. Gintsburg in
tax-farming, who had moved to St. Petersburg and created the Savings and Loan
Bank there; he arranged jobs for his and his wifes many relatives at the
enterprises he was in charge of.424
Not just the economy, the entire public life had been transformed in the
course of Alexandrian reforms, opening new opportunities for mercurial Jewry.
In the government resolutions permitting certain groups of Jews with higher
education to enter government service, there was no restriction in regard to
movement up the job ladder. With the attainment of the Full State Advisor rank,
a Jew could be elevated to the status of hereditary nobility on common
grounds.425
In 1864 the land reform began. It affected all social classes and strata. Its
statute did not in any way restrict the eligibility of Jews to vote in country
administrative elections or occupy elected country offices. In the course of
twenty-six years of the statute being in effect, Jews could be seen in many
places among town councilors and in the municipal executive councils.426
Similarly, the judicial statutes of 1864 stipulated no restrictions for Jews.
As a result of the judicial reform, an independent judicial authority was created,
and in place of private mediators the legal bar guild was established as an
independent class with a special corporate structure (and notably, even with the
un-appealable right to refuse legal assistance to an applicant on the basis of
moral evaluation of his person, including evaluation of his political views).
And there were no restrictions on Jews entering this class. Gessen wrote: Apart
from the legal profession, in which Jews had come to prominence, we begin
noticing them in court registries among investigative officials and in the ranks
of public prosecutors; in some places we already see Jews in the magistrate and
district court offices; they also served as jurors427 without any quota
restrictions (during the first decades after the reform). (Remarkably, during civil
trials the Jews were taking conventional jurors oath without any provision
made for the Jewish religion).

423 M.A. Aldanov. Russkie evrei v 70-80-kh godakh: Istoricheskiy etyud [The Russian Jews in
the 1870-1880s: An Historical Essay] // KRE-1, p. 45-46.
424 G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 141-142.
425 KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 328, 331.
426 EE [JE], T 7, p. 762.
427 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 168.
 At the same time municipal reform was being implemented. Initially it was
proposed to restrict Jewish representation among town councilors and in the
municipal executive councils by fifty percent, but because of objections by the
Minister of Internal Affairs, the City Statute of 1870 had reduced the maximal
share to one third; further, Jews were forbidden from occupying the post of
mayor.428 It was feared that otherwise Jewish internal cohesion and self-
segregation would allow them to obtain a leading role in town institutions and
give them an advantage in resolution of public issues.429 On the other hand,
Jews were equalized in electoral rights (earlier they could vote only as a
faction), which led to the increased influence of Jews in all city governing
matters (though in the free city of Odessa these rules were in place from the
very beginning; later, it was adopted in Kishinev too. Generally speaking, in
the south of Russia the social atmosphere was not permeated by contempt
toward Jews, unlike in Poland where it was diligently cultivated.430)
Thus perhaps the best period in Russian history for Jews went on. An
access to civil service was opened for Jews. The easing of legal restrictions
and the general atmosphere of the Age of Great Reforms had affected the spirit
of the Jewish people beneficially.431 It appeared that under the influence of the
Age of Great Reforms the traditional daily life of the Jewish populace had
turned toward the surrounding world and that Jewry had begun participating
as far as possible in the struggle for rights and liberty. There was not a single
area in the economic, public and spiritual life of Russia unaffected by the
creative energies of Russian Jews.432
And remember that from the beginning of the century the doors of Russian
general education were opened wide for Jews, though it took a long time for the
unwilling Jews to enter.
Later, a well-known lawyer and public figure, Ya. L. Teytel thus recalled the
Mozyr grammar school of the 1860s: The director of the school often
appealed to the Jews of Mozyr, telling them about the benefits of education and
about the desire of government to see more Jews in grammar schools.
Unfortunately, such pleas had fallen on deaf ears.433 So they were not
enthusiastic to enroll during the first years after the reform, even when they
were offered free education paid for by state and when school charters (1864)
declared that schools are open to everyone regardless confession.434 The
Ministry of National Education tried to make admission of Jews into general
education institutions easier; it exhibited benevolence toward young Jewish

428 Also, p. 168.

429 Also, p. 206.
430 EE [JE], T 6, p. 712, 715-716.
431 Also, T 13, p. 618.
432 KRE-1, Predislovie [Foreword], p. iii-iv.
433 Y.L. Teytel. Iz moey zhizni za 40 let [From My Life of 40 Years]. Paris: Y. Povolotskiy and
Company, 1925, p. 15.
434 I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian School] // KRE-1, p. 354.
students.435 (Here L. Deutsch had particularly distinguished the famous surgeon
N. I. Pirogov, then a trustee of the Novorossiysk school district, suggesting that
he had strongly contributed to the alleviation of hostility among my tribesmen
toward goyish schools and sciences.436) Soon after the ascension of Alexander
II, the Minister of Education thus formulated the government plan: It is
necessary to spread, by any means, the teaching of subjects of general
education, while avoiding interference with the religious education of children,
allowing parents to take care of it without any restrictions or hindrances on the
part of government.437 Education in state public schools was made mandatory
for children of Jewish merchants and honorary citizens.438
Yet all these measures, privileges and invitations, did not lead to a drastic
increase in Jewish admissions. By 1863 the share of Jewish students in Russian
schools reached 3.2%,439 that is, equal to their percentage in the population of
the empire. Apart from the rejection of Russian education by the Jewry, there
was a certain influence from Jewish public leaders who now saw their task
differently: With the advent of the Age of Great Reforms, the friends of
enlightenment had merged the question of mass education with the question of
the legal situation of Jews,440 that is, they began struggling for the immediate
removal of all remaining restrictions. After the shock of the Crimean War, such
a liberal possibility seemed quite realistic.
But after 1874, following enactment of the new military statute which
granted military service privileges to educated individuals, almost a magical
change happened with Jewish education. Jews began entering public schools in
mass.441 After the military reform of 1874, even Orthodox Jewish families
started sending their sons into high schools and institutions of higher learning to
reduce their term of military service.442 Among these privileges were not only
draft deferral and easement of service but also, according to the recollections of
Mark Aldanov, the possibility of taking the officers examination and receiving
officer rank. Sometimes they attained titles of nobility.443
In the 1870s an enormous increase in the number of Jewish students in
public education institutions occurred, leading to creation of numerous degreed
Jewish intelligentsia. In 1881 Jews composed around 9% of all university
students; by 1887, their share increased to 13.5%, i.e., one out of every seven
students. In some universities Jewish representation was much higher: in the
Department of Medicine of Kharkov University Jews comprised 42% of student
body; in the Department of Medicine of Odessa University 31%, and in the

435 Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 179.

436 L. Deych. Rol evreyev, T 1, p. 14.
437 EE [JE]*, T 13, p. 48.
438 Also, p. 49.
439 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 179.
440 EE [JE], T 13, p. 48.
441 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 208
442 KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 333.
443 M.A. Aldanov // KRE-1, p. 45.
School of Law 41%.444 In all schools of the country, the percentage of Jews
doubled to 12% from 1870 to 1880 (and compared to 1865, it had quadrupled).
In the Odessa school district it reached 32% by 1886, and in some schools it
was 75% and even more.445 (When D. A. Tolstoy, the Minister of Education
from 1866, had begun school reforms in 1871 by introducing the Classical
education standard with emphasis on antiquity, the ethnic Russian intelligentsia
boiled over, while Jews did not mind).
However, for a while, these educational developments affected only the
Jewish bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. The wide masses remained faithful to
their cheders and yeshivas, as the Russian elementary school offered nothing in
the way of privileges.446 The Jewish masses remained in isolation as before
due to specific conditions of their internal and outside life. 447 Propagation of
modern universal culture was extremely slow and new things took root with
great difficulty among the masses of people living in shtetls and towns of the
Pale of Settlement in the atmosphere of very strict religious traditions and
discipline.448 Concentrated within the Pale of Settlement, the Jewish masses
felt no need for the Russian language in their daily lives. As before, the
masses were still confined to the familiar hold of the primitive cheder
education.449 And whoever had just learned how to read had to immediately
proceed to reading the Bible in Hebrew.450
From the governments point of view, opening up general education to Jews
rendered state Jewish schools unnecessary. From 1862 Jews were permitted to
take posts of senior supervisors in such schools and so the personnel in these
schools was being gradually replenished with committed Jewish pedagogues,
who, acting in the spirit of the time, worked to improve mastery of Russian
language and reduce teaching of specifically Jewish subjects.451 In 1873 these
specialized schools were partially abolished and partially transformed, some
into primary specialized Jewish schools of general standard, with 3 or 6 years
study courses, and two specialized rabbinical schools in Vilna and Zhitomir
were transformed into teacher training colleges.452 The government sought to
overcome Jewish alienation through integrated education; however, the
Commission for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life was receiving reports both
from Jewish advocates, often high-ranked, and from the opponents of reform
who insisted that Jews must never be treated in the same way as other
444 I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian Schools] // KRE-1, p. 355-356.
445 EE [JE], T 13, p. 50.
446 I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian Schools] // KRE-1, p. 355-356.
447 EE [JE], T 13, p. 618.
448 G.Ya. Aronson. V borbe za grazhdanskie i natsionalnie prava: Obshchestvennie techeniya
v russkom evreystve [In the Struggle for Civil and National Rights: Social Currents in
Russian Jewry] // KRE-1, p. 207.
449 Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 178, 180.
450 Ya.G. Frumkin. Iz istorii russkogo evreystva: Vospominaniya, materiali, dokumenti [From
the History of Russian Jewry: Memoirs, Materials, and Documents] // KRE-1, p. 51.
451 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 180.
452 EE [JE], T 1, p. 823.
ethnic groups of the Empire, that they should not be permitted unrestricted
residence all over the country; it might be allowed only after all possible
measures were tried to turn Jews into useful productive citizens in the places
where they live now and when these measures would prove their success
beyond any doubt.453
Meanwhile, through the shock of ongoing reforms, especially of the
abolition of the burdensome recruiting obligation in 1856 (and through it the
negation of the corresponding power of Jewish leaders over their communities),
and then of the repeal of the associated special taxation in 1863, the
administrative power of the community leaders was significantly weakened in
comparison to their almost unrestricted authority in the past inherited from the
Qahal (abolished in 1844), that omnipotent arbiter of the Jewish life.454
It was then, at the end of 1850s and during the 1860s, when the baptized
Jew, Yakov Brafman, appeared before the government and later came out
publicly in an energetic attempt at radical reformation of the Jewish way of life.
He had petitioned the Tsar with a memorandum and was summoned to St.
Petersburg for consultations in the Synod. He set about exposing and explaining
the Qahal system (though a little bit late, since the Qahal had already been
abolished). For that purpose he had translated into Russian the resolutions of the
Minsk Qahal issued in the period between the end of the 18th and the beginning
of the 19th centuries. Initially he published the documents in parts and later (in
1869 and 1875) as a compilation, The Book of Qahal, which revealed the all-
encompassing absoluteness of the personal and material powerlessness of the
community member. The book had acquired exceptional weight in the eyes of
the authorities and was accepted as an official guidebook; it won recognition
(often by hearsay) in wide circles of Russian society; it was referred to as the
Brafmans triumph and lauded as an extraordinary success.455 (Later the
book was translated into French, German, and Polish.) 456 The Book of Qahal
managed to instill in a great number of individuals a fanatical hatred toward
Jews as the worldwide enemy of Christians; it had succeeded in spreading
misconceptions about Jewish way of life.457
The mission of Brafman, the collection and translation of the acts issued
by the Qahal had alarmed the Jewish community; At their demand, a
government commission which included the participation of Jewish community
representatives was created to verify Brafmans work. Some Jewish writers
were quick to come forward with evidence that Brafman distorted some of the
Qahal documents and wrongly interpreted others; one detractor had even had
doubts about their authenticity.458 (A century later in 1976, The Short Jewish
Encyclopedia confirmed the authenticity of Brafmans documents and the good
453 Yu Gessen*, T 2, p. 205.
454 Also, p. 170.
455 Also, p. 200-201.
456 KEE [JEE], T 1, p. 532.
457 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 200-201.
458 EE [JE], T 4, p. 918.
quality of his translation but blamed him for false interpretation.459 The Russian
Jewish Encyclopedia (1994) pointed out that the documents published by
Brafman are a valuable source for studying the history of Jews in Russia at the
end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. 460 (Apropos, the poet
Khodasevich was the grand-nephew of Brafman).
Brafman claimed that governmental laws cannot destroy the malicious
force lurking in the Jewish self-administration According to him, Jewish
self-rule is not limited to Qahals but allegedly involves the entire Jewish
people all over the world and because of that the Christian peoples cannot
get rid of Jewish exploitation until everything that enables Jewish self-
segregation is eliminated. Further, Brafman view[ed] the Talmud not as a
national and religious code but as a civil and political code going against the
political and moral development of Christian nations 461 and creating a
Talmudic republic. He insisted that Jews form a nation within a nation; that
they do not consider themselves subject to national laws;462 that one of the
main goals of the Jewish community is to confuse the Christians to turn the
latter into no more than fictitious owners of their property. 463 On a larger scale,
he accused the Society for the Advancement of Enlightenment among the Jews
of Russia and the Alliance Isralite Universelle for their role in the Jewish
world conspiracy.464 According to Yu. Gessens opinion, the only demand of
The Book of Qahal was the radical extermination of Jewish self-governance
regardless of all their civil powerlessness.465
The State Council, having mitigated the uncompromised style of The
Book of Qahal, declared that even if administrative measures would succeed in
erasing the outward differences between Jews and the rest of population, it will
not in the least eliminate the attitudes of seclusion and nearly the outright
hostility toward Christians which thrive in Jewish communities. This Jewish
separation, harmful for the country, can be destroyed, on one hand, through the
weakening of social connections between the Jews and reduction of the abusive
power of Jewish elders to the extent possible, and, on the other hand, through
spreading of education among Jews, which is actually more important.466
And precisely the latter process education was already underway in
the Jewish community. A previous Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah
Movement of the 1840s, was predominantly based on German culture; they
were completely ignorant of Russian culture (they were familiar with Goethe

459 KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 532.

460 Rossiyskaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya [The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia] (henceforth
REE). Moscow, 1994T 1, p. 164.
461 Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 200-201.
462 EE [JE], T 4, p. 918, 920.
463 KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 532.
464 REE [RJE], T 1, p. 164.
465 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 202.
466 Also*, p. 202-203.
and Schiller but did not know Pushkin and Lermontov). 467 Until the mid-19th
century, even educated Jews, with rare exceptions, having mastered the German
language, at the same time did not know the Russian language and literature. 468
However, as those Maskilim sought self-enlightenment and not the mass
education of the Jewish people, the movement died out by the 1860s. 469 In the
1860s, Russian influences burst into the Jewish society. Until then Jews were
not living but rather residing in Russia, 470 perceiving their problems as
completely unconnected to the surrounding Russian life. Before the Crimean
War the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia acknowledged German culture
exclusively but after the reforms it began gravitating toward Russian culture.
Mastery of the Russian language increases self-esteem.471 From now on the
Jewish Enlightenment developed under the strong influence of the Russian
culture. The best Russian Jewish intellectuals abandoned their people no
longer; they did not depart into the area of exclusively personal interests, but
cared about making their peoples lot easier. Well, after all, Russian literature
taught that the strong should devote themselves to the weak.472
However, this new enlightenment of the Jewish masses was greatly
complicated by the strong religiosity of said masses, which in the eyes of
progressives was doubtlessly a regressive factor,473 whereas the emerging Jewish
Enlightenment movement was quite secular for that time. Secularization of the
Jewish public consciousness was particularly difficult because of the
exceptional role religion played in the Diaspora as the foundation of Jewish
national consciousness over the course of the many centuries. And so the
wide development of secular Jewish national consciousness began, in essence,
only at the end of the century.474 It was not because of inertia but due to a
completely deliberate stance as the Jew did not want risking separation from his
God.475

467 S.M. Sliozberg. O russko-evreyskoy intelligentsia [On the Russo-Jewish Intelligentsia] //

Evreyskiy mir: Ezhegodnik na 1939g. [Jewish World: Yearbook for 1939] (henceforth
EM-1 [JW-1]). Paris: Obedinenie russko-evreyskoy intelligentsia [Association of the
Russo-Jewish Intelligentsia], p. 34.
468 EE [JE], T 3, p. 334.
469 Yudl. Mark. Literatura na idish v Rossii [Literature in Yiddish in Russia] // KRE-1, p. 521;
G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-Evreyskaya pechat [Russo-Jewish Press] // Also, p. 548.
470 B. Orlov. Ne te vi uchili alfaviti // Vremya i mi: Mezhdunarodniy zhurnal literature i
obshchestvennikh problem (henceforth-VM). Tel-Aviv, 1975, No1, p. 130.
471 M. Osherovich. Russkie evrei v Soedinennikh Shtatakh Ameriki [Russian Jews in the United
States of America] // KRE-1, p. 289-290.
472 S.M. Sliozberg // EM-1, p. 35.
473 G.Ya. Aronson*. V borbe za[In the Struggle for] // KRE-1, p 210.
474 S. Shvarts. Evrei v Sovetskom Soyuze c nachala Vtoroy mirovoy voyni. 1939-1965 [The
Jews in the Soviet Union from the Start of the Second World War. 1939-1965]. New York:
Amerikanskiy evreyskiy rabochiy komitet [American Jewish Workers Committee], 1966, p.
290.
475 I.M. Bikerman. K samopoznaniyu evreya: Chem mi bili, chem mi stali, chem mi dolzhni
bit. [What We Were, What We Became, and What We Should Be]. Paris, 1939, p. 48.
 So the Russian Jewish intelligentsia met the Russian culture at the moment
of birth. Moreover, it happened at the time when the Russian intelligentsia was
also developing expansively and at the time when Western culture gushed into
Russian life (Buckle, Hegel, Heine, Hugo, Comte, and Spencer). It was pointed
out that several prominent figures of the first generation of Russian Jewish
intelligentsia (S. Dubnov, M. Krol, G. Sliozberg, O. Gruzenberg, and Saul
Ginzburg) were born in that period, 1860-1866476 (though their equally
distinguished Jewish revolutionary peers M. Gots, G. Gershuni, F. Dan,
Azef, and L. Akselrod were also born during those years and many other
Jewish revolutionaries, such as P. Akselrod and L. Deych, were born still earlier,
in the 1850s).
In St. Petersburg in 1863 the authorities permitted establishment of the
Society for the Spreading of Enlightenment among the Jews in Russia (SSE)
supported by the wealthy Evzel Gintsburg and A. M. Brodsky. Initially, during
the first decade of its existence, its membership and activities were limited; the
Society was preoccupied with publishing activities and not with school
education; yet still its activities caused a violent reaction on the part of Jewish
conservatives477 (who also protested against publication of the Pentateuch in
Russian as a blasphemous encroachment on the holiness of the Torah). From the
1870s, the SSE provided financial support to Jewish schools. Their cultural
work was conducted in Russian, with a concession for Hebrew, but not Yiddish,
which was then universally recognized as a jargon.478 In the opinion of Osip
Rabinovich, a belletrist, the spoiled jargon used by Jews in Russia cannot
facilitate enlightenment, because it is not only impossible to express abstract
notions in it, but one cannot even express a decent thought with it. 479 Instead
of mastering the wonderful Russian language, we Jews in Russia stick to our
spoiled, cacophonous, erratic, and poor jargon.480 (In their day, the German
Maskilim ridiculed the jargon even more sharply.)
And so a new social force arose in Russian Jewry, which did not hesitate
entering the struggle against the union of capital and synagogue, as
expressed by the liberal Yu. I. Gessen. That force, nascent and for the time being
weak, was the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language.481
Its first-born was the Odessa magazine Rassvet [Dawn], published for two
years from 1859 to 1861 by the above-mentioned O. Rabinovich. The magazine
was positioned to serve as a medium for dissemination of useful knowledge,
true religiousness, rules of communal life and morality; it was supposed to
predispose Jews to learn the Russian language and to become friends with the

476 K. Leytes. Pamyati M.A. Krolya [The Memoirs of M.A. Krol] // Evreyskiy mir [Jewish
World]: Anthology 2 (henceforth EM-2 [JW-2]). New York: Soyuz russkikh evreyev v Nyu
Yorke [Union of Russian Jews in New York], 1944, p. 408-411.
477 EE [JE], T 13, p. 59.
478 I.M. Trotskiy. Samodeyatelnost[Individual Initiative] // KRE-1, p. 471-474.
479 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 172.
480 EE [JE]*, T 3, p. 335.
481 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 170.
national scholarship482 Rassvet also reported on politics, expressing love for
the Fatherland and the intention to promote the governments views483 with
the goal of communal living with other peoples, participating in their
education and sharing their successes, while at the same time preserving,
developing, and perfecting our distinct national heritage. 484 The leading
Rassvetpublicist, L. Levanda, defined the goal of the magazine as twofold: to
act defensively and offensively: defensively against attacks from the outside,
when our human rights and confessional (religious) interests must be defended,
and offensively against our internal enemy: obscurantism, everydayness, social
life troubles, and our tribal vices and weaknesses.485
This last direction, to reveal the ill places of the inner Jewish life,
aroused a fear in Jewish circles that it might lead to new legislative
repressions. So the existing Jewish newspapers (in Yiddish) saw the Rassvets
direction as extremely radical. Yet these same moderate newspapers by their
mere appearance had already shaken the patriarchal structure of [Jewish]
community life maintained by the silence of the people. 486 Needless to say, the
struggle between the rabbinate and Hasidic Judaism went on unabated during
that period and this new 1860s struggle of the leading publicists against the
stagnant foundations of daily life had added to it. Gessen noted that in the
1860s, the system of repressive measures against ideological opponents did not
seem offensive even for the conscience of intelligent people. For example,
publicist A. Kovner, the Jewish Pisarev [a radical Russian writer and social
critic], could not refrain from tipping off a Jewish newspaper to the Governor
General of Novorossiysk.487 (In the 1870s Pisarev was extremely popular
among Jewish intellectuals.)488
M. Aldanov thinks that Jewish participation in Russian cultural and
political life had effectively begun at the end of the 1870s (and possibly a
decade earlier in the revolutionary movement).489
In the 1870s new Jewish publicists (L. Levanda, the critic S. Vengerov, the
poet N. Minsky) began working with the general Russian press. (According to
G. Aronson, Minsky expressed his desire to go to the Russo-Turkish War to
fight for his brothers Slavs). The Minister of Education Count Ignatiev then
expressed his faith in Jewish loyalty to Russia. After the Russo-Turkish War of
1877-1878, rumors about major auspicious reforms began circulating among the
Jews. In the meantime, the center of Jewish intellectual life shifted from Odessa
to St. Petersburg, where new writers and attorneys gained prominence as leaders
of public opinion. In that hopeful atmosphere, publication of Rassvet was

482 Also, p. 171.

483 G.Ya. Aronson*. Russko-Evreyskaya pechat [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 562.
484 S.M. Ginzburg* // EM-1 [JW-1], p. 36.
485 Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 173.
486 Also*, p. 174.
487 Also, p. 174-175.
488 EE [JE], T 3, p. 480.
489 M.A. Aldanov // KRE-1, p. 44.
resumed in St. Petersburg in 1879. In the opening editorial, M. I. Kulisher
wrote: Our mission is to be an organ of expression of the necessities of
Russian Jews for promoting the awakening of the huge mass of Russian
Jews from mental hibernation it is also in the interests of Russia. In that
goal the Russian Jewish intelligentsia does not separate itself from the rest of
Russian citizens.490
Alongside the development of the Jewish press, Jewish literature could not
help but advance first in Hebrew, then in Yiddish, and then in Russian,
inspired by the best of Russian literature.491 Under Alexander II, there were
quite a few Jewish authors who persuaded their co-religionists to study the
Russian language and look at Russia as their homeland.492
Naturally, in the conditions of the 1860s-1870s, the Jewish educators, still
few in numbers and immersed in Russian culture, could not avoid moving
toward assimilation, in the same direction which under analogous conditions
led the intelligent Jews of Western Europe to unilateral assimilation with the
dominant people.493 However, there was a difference: in Europe the general
cultural level of the native peoples was consistently higher and so in Russia
these Jews could not assimilate with the Russian people, still weakly touched by
culture, nor with the Russian ruling class (who rejected them); they could only
assimilate with the Russian intelligentsia, which was then very small in number
but already completely secular, rejecting, among other things, their God. Now
Jewish educators also tore away from Jewish religiosity and, being unable to
find an alternative bond with their people, they were becoming completely
estranged from them and spiritually considered themselves solely as Russian
citizens.494
A worldly rapprochement between the Russian and Jewish intelligentsias
was developing.495 It was facilitated by the general revitalization of Jewish life
with several categories of Jews now allowed to live outside the Pale of
Settlement. Development of railroad communications and possibilities of travel
abroad all this contributed to a closer contact of the Jewish ghetto with the
surrounding world.496 Moreover, by the 1860s up to one-third of Odessas
Jews could speak Russian.497 The population there grew quickly, because of
massive resettlement to Odessa of both Russian and foreign Jews, the latter
primarily from Germany and Galicia.498 The blossoming of Odessa by the
middle of the 19th century presaged the prosperity of all Russian Jewry toward
490 G.Ya. Aronson*. Russko-evreyskaya pechat [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 558-561.
491 M. Krol. Natsionalizm i assimilyatsiya v evreyskoy istorii [Nationalism and Assimilation in
Jewish History] // EM-1 [JW-1], p. 188-189.
492 James Parkes. The Jew and his Neighbor: a Study of the Causes of anti-Semitism. Paris:
YMCA-Press, 1932, p. 41.
493 Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 198.
494 Also.
495 Also, p. 177.
496 EE [JE], T 13, p. 638.
497 G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-Evreyskaya pechat [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 551.
498 KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 117.
the end of the 19th to the beginning of 20th century. Free Odessa developed
according to its own special laws, differing from the All-Russian statutes since
the beginning of the 19th century. It used to be a free port and was even open to
Turkish ships during the war with Turkey. The main occupation of Odessas
Jews in this period was the grain trade. Many Jews were small traders and
middlemen (mainly between the landowners and the exporters), as well as
agents of prominent foreign and local (mainly Greek) wheat trading companies.
At the grain exchange, Jews worked as stockbrokers, appraisers, cashiers,
scalers, and loaders; the Jews were in a dominant position in grain commerce:
by 1870 most of grain export was in their hands. In 1910 89.2% of grain
exports was under their control.499 In comparison with other cities in the Pale
of Settlement, more Jews of the independent professions lived in Odessa and
they had better relations with educated Russian circles, and were favorably
looked upon and protected by the high administration of the city. N. Pirogov
[a prominent Russian scientist and surgeon], the Trustee of the Odessa School
District from 1856-1858, particularly patronized the Jews.500 A contemporary
observer had vividly described this Odessas clutter with fierce competition
between Jewish and Greek merchants, where in some years half the city, from
the major bread bigwigs, to the thrift store owners, lived off the sale of grain
products. In Odessa, with her non-stop business commotion bonded by the
Russian language, it was impossible to draw a line, to separate clearly a
wheat merchant or a banker from a man of an intellectual profession.501
Thus in general among the educated Jews the process of adopting all
things Russian had accelerated.502 European education and knowledge of
the Russian language had become necessities; everyone hurried to learn the
Russian language and Russian literature; they thought only about hastening
integration and complete blending with their social surroundings; they aspired
not only for the mastery of the Russian language but for for the complete
Russification and adoption of the Russian spirit, so that the Jew would not
differ from the rest of citizens in anything but religion. The contemporary
observer M. G. Morgulis wrote: Everybody had begun thinking of themselves
as citizens of their homeland; everybody now had a new Fatherland.503
Members of the Jewish intelligentsia believed that for the state and public
good they had to get rid of their ethnic traits and to merge with the dominant
nationality. A contemporary Jewish progressive wrote, that Jews, as a nation,
do not exist, that they consider themselves Russians of the Mosaic
faithJews recognize that their salvation lies in the merging with the Russian
people.504

499 Also, p. 117-118.

500 Also, p. 118.
501 K. Itskovich. Odessa-khlebniy gorod [OdessaCity of Bread] // Novoe russkoe slovo [The
New Russian Word], New York, 1984, 21 March, p. 6.
502 EE [JE], T 3, p. 334-335.
503 Also*, T 13, p. 638.
504 G.Ya. Aronson. V borbe za[In the Struggle for] // KRE-1, p. 207.
 It is perhaps worth naming here Veniamin Portugalov, a doctor and
publicist. In his youth he harbored revolutionary sentiments and because of that
he even spent some time as a prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress. From 1871
he lived in Samara. He played a prominent role in development of rural health
service and public health science. He was one of the pioneers of therapy for
alcoholism and the struggle against alcohol abuse in Russia. He also organized
public lectures. From a young age he shared the ideas of Narodniks [a segment
of the Ruslsian intelligentsia, who left the cities and went to the people
(narod) in the villages, preaching on the moral right to revolt against the
established order] about the pernicious role of Jews in the economic life of the
Russian peasantry. These ideas laid the foundation for the dogmas of the Judeo-
Christian movement of the 1880s (The Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood).
Portugalov deemed it necessary to free Jewish life from ritualism, and believed
that Jewry could exist and develop a culture and civilization only after being
dissolved in European peoples (he had meant the Russian [people]).505
A substantial reduction in the number of Jewish conversions to Christianity
was observed during the reign of Alexander II as it became unnecessary after the
abolishment of the institution of military cantonists and the widening of Jewish
rights.506 And from now on the sect of Skhariya the Jew began to be professed
openly too.507
Such an attitude on the part of affluent Jews, especially those living outside
the Pale of Settlement and those with Russian education, toward Russia as
undeniably a homeland is noteworthy. And so it had to be noticed and was. In
view of the great reforms, all responsible Russian Jews were, without
exaggeration, patriots and monarchists and adored Alexander II. M. N.
Muravyov, then Governor General of the Northwest Krai famous for his
ruthlessness toward the Poles [who rebelled in 1863], patronized Jews in the
pursuit of the sound objective of winning the loyalty of a significant portion of
the Jewish population to the Russian state.508 Though during the Polish
uprising of 1863 Polish Jewry was mainly on the side of the Poles; 509 a healthy
national instinct prompted the Jews of the Vilnius, Kaunas, and Grodno
Guberniyas to side with Russia because they expected more justice and
humane treatment from Russians than from the Poles, who, though historically
tolerating the Jews, had always treated them as a lower race. 510 (This is how
Ya. Teitel described it: The Polish Jews were always detached from the

505 KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 692-693.

506 EE, T 11, p. 894.
507 KEE [SJE], T 2, p. 510.
508 V.S. Mandel. Konservativnie i razrushitelnie elemente v evreystve [Conservative and
Destructive Elements in Jewry] // Rossiya i evrei: Sb. 1 [Russia and the Jews: Anthology 1
(henceforthRiE [RandJ]) / Otechestvennoe obedinenie russkikh evreyev za granitsey [The
Patriotic Union of Russian Jews Abroad]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1978 [1st Publication
Berlin: Osnova, 1924], p. 195.
509 I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian Schools] // KRE-1, p. 356.
510 V.S. Mandel // RiE [RandJ], p. 195.
Russian Jews; they looked at Russian Jews from the Polish perspective. On the
other hand, the Poles in private shared their opinion on the Russian Jews in
Poland: The best of these Jews are our real enemy. Russian Jews, who had
infested Warsaw, Lodz, and other major centers of Poland, brought with them
Russian culture, which we do not like.)511
In those years, the Russification of Jews on its territory was highly
desirable for the Tsarist government.512 Russian authorities recognized
socialization with Russian youth as a sure method of re-education of the
Jewish youth to eradicate their hostility toward Christians.513
Still, this newborn Russian patriotism among Jews had clear limits. The
lawyer and publicist I. G. Orshansky specified that to accelerate the process it
was necessary to create conditions for the Jews such that they could consider
themselves as free citizens of a free civilized country. 514 The above-mentioned
Lev Levanda, a Jewish scholar living under the jurisdiction of the Governor of
Vilnius, then wrote: I will become a Russian patriot only when the Jewish
Question is resolved conclusively and satisfactory. A modern Jewish author
who experienced the long and bitter 20th century and then had finally emigrated
to Israel, replied to him looking back across the chasm of a century: Levanda
does not notice that one cannot lay down conditions to Motherland. She must be
loved unconditionally, without conditions or pre-conditions; she is loved simply
because she is the Mother. This stipulation love under conditions was
extremely consistently maintained by the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia for one
hundred years, though in all other respects they were ideal Russians515
And yet in the described period only small and isolated groups of Jewry
became integrated into Russian civil society; moreover, it was happening in the
larger commercial and industrial centers leading to the appearance of an
exaggerated notion about victorious advance of the Russian language deep into
Jewish life, all the while the wide Jewish masses were untouched by the new
trends isolated not only from the Russian society but from the Jewish
intelligentsia as well.516 In the 1860s and 1870s, the Jewish people en masse
were still unaffected by assimilation, and the danger of the Jewish intelligentsia
breaking away from the Jewish masses was real. (In Germany, Jewish
assimilation went smoother as there were no Jewish popular masses there
the Jews were better off socially and did not historically live in such crowded
enclaves).517
However, as early as the end of the 1860s, some members of the Jewish
intelligentsia began voicing opposition to such a conversion of Jewish
intellectuals into simple Russian patriots. Perets Smolensky was the first to

511 Ya. Teytel. Iz moey zhizni[From My Life], p. 239.

512 See.: EE [JE], T 3, p. 335; and others.
513 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 208.
514 EE [JE], T 3, p. 335.
515 B. Orlov // VM, 1975, No1, p. 132.
516 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 181.
517 G.Ya. Aronson. V borbe za[In the Struggle for] // KRE-1, p. 208-209.
speak of this in 1868: that assimilation with the Russian character is fraught
with national danger for the Jews; that although education should not be
feared, it is necessary to hold on to the Jewish historical past; that acceptance of
the surrounding national culture still requires perservation of the Jewish
national character518; and that the Jews are not a religious sect, but a nation.519
So if the Jewish intelligentsia withdraws from its people, the latter would never
liberate itself from administrative oppression and spiritual stupor. (The poet I.
Gordon had put it this way: Be a man on the street and a Jew at home.)
The St. Petersburg journals Rassvet (1879-1882) and Russkiy Evrei
[Russian Jew] had already followed this direction. 520 They successfully
promoted the study of Jewish history and contemporary life among Jewish
youth. At the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s, cosmopolitan
and national directions in Russian Jewry became distinct.521 In essence, the
owners of Rassvet had already abandoned the belief in the truth of
assimilation. Rassvet unconsciously went by the path of the awakening of
ethnic identity it was clearly expressing aJewish national bias. The
illusions of Russification were disappearing.522
The general European situation of the latter half of the 19th century
facilitated development of national identity. There was a violent Polish uprising,
the war for the unification of Italy, and then of Germany, and later of the Balkan
Slavs. The national idea blazed and triumphed everywhere. Obviously, these
developments would continue among the Jewish intelligentsia even without the
events of 1881-1882.
Meanwhile, in the 1870s, the generally favorable attitudes of Russians
toward Jews, which had developed during the Alexandrian reforms, began to
change. Russian society was concerned with Brafmans publications, which
were taken quite seriously.
All this coincided with the loud creation of the Alliance Isralite
Universelle in Paris in 1860; its goal was to defend the interests of Jewry all
over the world; its Central Committee was headed by Adolphe Cremieux. 523
Insufficiently well-informed about the situation of Jews in Russia, the
Alliance took interest in Russian Jewry and soon began consistently working
on behalf of Russian Jews. The Alliance did not have Russian branches and did
not function within Russia. Apart from charitable and educational work, the
Alliance, in defending Russian Jews, several times addressed Russian
government directly, though often inappropriately. (For example, in 1866 the
Alliance appealed to prevent the execution of Itska Borodai who was convicted
of politically motivated arson. However, he was not sentenced to death at all,

518 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 198-199.

519 EE [JE], T 3, p. 336.
520 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 232-233.
521 S.M. Ginzburg. Nastroeniya evreyskoy molodezhi v 80-kh godakh proshlogo stoletiya. //
EM-2, p. 380.
522 G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-evreyskaya pechat [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 561-562.
523 EE [JE], T 1, p. 932; KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 103.
and other Jews implicated in the affair were acquitted even without the petition.
In another case, Cremieux protested against the resettlement of Jews to the
Caucasus and the Amur region although there was no such Russian
government plan whatsoever. In 1869 he again protested, this time against the
nonexistent persecution of Jews in St. Petersburg. 524 Cremieux had also
complained to the President of the United States about similarly nonexistent
persecutions against the Jewish religion by the Russian government).
Nevertheless, according to the report of the Russian ambassador in Paris, the
newly-formed Alliance (with the Mosaic Tablets over the Earth on its emblem)
had already enjoyed extraordinary influence on Jewish societies in all
countries. All this alarmed the Russian government as well as Russian public.
Yakov Brafman actively campaigned against the Universal Jewish Alliance. He
claimed that the Alliance, like all Jewish societies, is double-faced (its official
documents proclaim one thing while the secret ones say another) and that the
task of the Alliance is to shield the Jewry from the perilous influence of
Christian civilization.525 As a result, the Society for the Spreading of
Enlightenment among the Jews in Russia was also accused of having a mission
to achieve and foster universal Jewish solidarity and caste-like seclusion.526)
Fears of the Alliance were also nurtured by the very emotional opening
proclamation of its founders to the Jews of all nations and by the
dissemination of false Alliance documents. Regarding Jewish unity the
proclamation contained the following wording: Jews! If you believe that the
Alliance is good for you, that while being the parts of different nations you
nevertheless can have common feelings, desires, and hopes if you think that
your disparate efforts, good aspirations and individual ambitions could become
a major force when united and moving in one direction and toward one goal
then please support us with your sympathy and assistance.527
Later in France a document surfaced containing an alleged proclamation
To Jews of the Universe by Aldolphe Cremieux himself. It was very likely a
forgery. Perhaps it was one of the drafts of the opening proclamation not
accepted by the Alliance founders. However it had resonated well with
Brafmans accusations of the Alliance having hidden goals: We live in alien
lands and we cannot take an interest in the variable concerns of those nations
until our own moral and material interests are endangered the Jewish
teachings must fill the entire world. Heated arguments were exchanged in
this regard in Russian press. I. S. Aksakov concluded in his newspaper Rus that
the question of the document under discussion being a falsehood is rather
irrelevant in this case because of veracity of the expressed herein Jewish views
and aspirations.528
524 EE [JE], T 1, p. 945-950.
525 Also, p. 948-950.
526 Also*, T 2, p. 742.
527 Also, T 1, p. 933-936.
528 EE [JE], T 1, p. 950-951; I.S. Aksakov. Soch. [Essays].: V7 T Moscow., 1886-1887. T 3, p.
843-844.
 The pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia writes that from the 1870s
fewer voices were heard in defense of Jews in the Russian press. The notion
of Jews allegedly united under the aegis of a powerful political organization
administered by the Alliance Isralite Universelle was taking root in Russian
society.529 Thus the foundation of the Alliance produced in Russia (and
possibly not only in Russia) a reaction counterproductive to the goals that the
Alliance had specified.
If the founders of the Alliance could have foreseen the sheer scale of
condemnations against the idea of worldwide Jewish solidarity and even the
accusations of conspiracy which had erupted after the creation of the
organization, they might have refrained from following that route, especially
considering that the Alliance did not alter the course of Jewish history.
After 1874, when a new military charter introducing the universal military
service obligation in Russia came into force, numerous news article on draft
evasion by Jews began fueling resentment against the Jews in the Russian
society .530 The Alliance Isralite Universelle was accused of intending to care
about young Jews leaving Russia to escape conscription enforced by the new
law so that using support from abroad, the Jews would have more
opportunities than other subjects to move out of the country. (This question
would arise once again precisely a century later in the 1970s.) Cremieux replied
that the mission of the Alliance was the struggle against religious persecution
and that the Alliance had decided henceforth not to assist Jews trying to evade
military obligation in Russia. Rather it would issue an appeal to our co-
religionists in Russia in order to motivate them to comply with all the
requirements of the new law.531
Besides crossing the border, another way to evade military service was self-
mutilation. General Denikin (who was quite a liberal before and even during the
revolution) described hundreds of bitter cases of the self-mutilation he
personally saw during several years of service at the military medical
examination board in Volyn Guberniya. Such numerous and desperate self-
injuries are all the more striking considering that it was already the beginning of
the 20th century.532
As previously mentioned, the influx of Jews into public schools,
professional schools and institutions of higher learning had sharply increased
after 1874 when a new military charter stipulating educational privileges came
into force. This increase was dramatic. While calls to restrict Jewish enrollment
in public education institutions were heard from the Northwestern Krai even
before, in 1875, the Ministry of Public Education informed the government that

529 EE [JE], T 2, p. 738.

530 Also, p. 738-739.
531 Also, T 1, p. 948-949.
532 A.I. Denikin. Put russkogo ofitsera [The Path of a Russian Officer]. New York: Publisher-
named-Chekov, 1953, p. 284.
it was impossible to admit all Jews trying to enter public educational
institutions without constraining the Christian population.533
It is worth mentioning here the G. Aronsons regretful note that even D.
Mendeleev of St. Petersburg University showed anti-Semitism.534 The Jewish
Encyclopedia summarizes all of the 1870s period as a turnaround in the
attitudes of a part of Russian intelligentsia which rejected the ideals of the
previous decade especially in regard to the Jewish Question.535
An interesting feature of that time was that it was the press (the rightist one,
of course) and not governmental circles that was highly skeptical (and in no way
hostile) towards the project of full legal emancipation of the Jews. The
following quotes are typical. How can all the citizenship rights be granted to
this stubbornly fanatical tribe, allowing them to occupy the highest
administrative posts? Only education and social progress can truly bring
together Jews and Christians. Introduce them into the universal family of
civilization, and we will be the first to say words of love and reconciliation to
them. Civilization will generally benefit from such a rapprochement as the
intelligent and energetic tribe will contribute much to it. The Jews will
realize that time is ripe to throw off the yoke of intolerance which originates in
the overly strict interpretations of the Talmud. Until education brings the Jews
to the thought that it is necessary to live not only at the expense of Russian
society but also for the good of this society, no discussion could be held about
granting them more rights than those they have now. Even if it is possible to
grant the Jews all civil rights, then in any case they cannot be allowed into any
official positions where Christians would be subject to their authority and
where they could have influence on the administration and legislation of a
Christian country.536
The attitude of the Russian press of that time is well reflected in the words
of the prominent St. Petersburg newspaper Golos: Russian Jews have no right
to complain that the Russian press is biased against their interests. Most Russian
periodicals favor equal civil rights for Jews; it is understandable that Jews
strive to expand their rights toward equality with the rest of Russian citizens;
yet some dark forces drive Jewish youth into the craziness of political
agitation. Why is that only a few political trials do not list Jews among
defendants, and, importantly, among the most prominent defendants? That
and the common Jewish practice of evading military service are
counterproductive for the cause of expanding the civil rights of Jews; one
aspiring to achieve rights must prove beforehand his ability to fulfill the duties
which come with those rights and avoid putting himself into an extremely
unfavorable and dismal position with respect to the interests of state and
society.537
533 EE [JE], T 13, p. 50-51.
534 G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-evreyskaya pechet [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 558.
535 EE [JE], T 12, p. 525-526.
536 EE [JE]*, T 2, p. 736, 740.
537 Golos [The Voice], 1881, No46, 15 (27) February, p. 1.
 Yet, the Encyclopedia notes, despite all this propaganda, bureaucratic
circles were dominated by the idea that the Jewish Question could only be
resolved through emancipation. For instance, in March 1881 a majority of the
members of the Commission for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life tended to
think that it was necessary to equalize the Jews in rights with the rest of the
population.538 Raised during the two decades of Alexandrian reforms, the
bureaucrats of that period were in many respects taken by the reforms
triumphant advances. And so proposals quite radical and favorable to Jews were
put forward on several occasions by Governors General of the regions
constituting the Pale of Settlement.
Lets not overlook the new initiatives of the influential Sir Moses
Montefiore, who paid another visit to Russia in 1872; and the pressure of both
Benjamin Disraeli and Bismarck on Russian State Chancellor Gorchakov at the
Berlin Congress of 1878. Gorchakov had to uneasily explain that Russia was
not in the least against religious freedom and did grant it fully, but religious
freedom should not be confused with Jews having equal political and civil
rights.539
Yet the situation in Russia developed toward emancipation. And when in
1880 the Count Loris-Melikov was made the Minister of the Interior with
exceptional powers, the hopes of Russian Jews for emancipation had become
really great and well-founded. Emancipation seemed impending and inevitable.
And at this very moment the members of Narodnaya Volya assassinated
Alexander II, thus destroying in the bud many liberal developments in Russia,
among them the hopes for full Jewish civil equality.
Sliozberg noted that the Tsar was killed on the eve of Purim. After a series
of attempts, the Jews were not surprised at this coincidence, but they became
restless about the future.540

538 EE [JE], T 2, p. 740.

539 Also, T 4, p. 246, 594.
540 G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 99.
 Chapter 5. After the Murder of Alexander II

The murder of the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II, shocked the peoples

consciousness something the Narodovoltsi intended, but that has been
intentionally or unintentionally ignored by historians with the passing of
decades. The deaths of heirs or tsars of the previous century Aleksei
Petrovich, Ivan Antonovich, Peter III, and Paul were violent, but that was
unknown to the people. The murder of March 1st, 1881, caused a panic in
minds nationwide. For the common people, and particularly for the peasant
masses it was as if the very foundations of their lives were shaken. Again, as the
Narodovoltsi calculated, this could not help but invite some explosion.
And an explosion did occur, but an unpredictable one: Jewish pogroms in
Novorossiya and Ukraine.
Six weeks after the regicide, the pogroms of Jewish shops, institutions, and
homes suddenly engulfed a vast territory, with tremendous, epidemic force.541
Indeed, it was rather spontaneous. Local people, who, for the most different
reasons desired to get even with the Jews, posted incendiary posters and
organized basic cadres of pogromists, which were quickly joined by hundreds of
volunteers, who joined without any exhortation, caught up in the generally wild
atmosphere and promise of easy money. In this there was something
spontaneous. However, even the crowds, fueled by alcohol, while
committing theft and violence, directed their blows in one direction only: in the
direction of the Jews the unruliness only stopping at the thresholds of
Christian homes.542
The first pogrom occurred in Elizavetgrad, on 15 April. Disorder
intensified, when peasants from the neighboring settlements arrived, in order to
profit off the goods of the Jews. At first the military did not act, because of
uncertainty; finally significant cavalry forces succeeded in ending the
pogrom.543 The arrival of fresh forces put an end to the pogrom. 544 There

541 Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya (dalee EE). [The Jewish Encyclopedia (from here JE)]. V 16
T. Sankt-Peterburg.: Obshchestvo dlya Nauchnikh Evreyskikh Izdaniy i Izdatelstvo
Brokgauz-Efron, 1906-1913. T. 12, s. 611. Society for Scientific Jewish Publications and
Publisher Brokgauz-Efron.
542 Yu. Gessen. Istoriya evreyskogo naroda v Rossii (dalee Yu. Gessen): V2 T. L., 1925-1927.
T2., s. 215-216. History of the Jewish People of Russia (from here Yu. Gessen).
543 Ibid. Pages 216-217.
544 EE, T 12, page 612.
was no rape and murder in this pogrom. 545 According to other sources: one
Jew was killed. The pogrom was put down on 17 April by troops, who fired into
the crowd of thugs.546 However, from Elizavetgrad the stirring spread to
neighboring settlements; in the majority of cases, the disorders were confined to
plundering of taverns. And after a week, a pogrom occurred in the Ananevskiy
Uezd [district] of Odessa Guberniya [province], then in Ananev itself, where
it was caused by some petty bourgeois, who spread a rumor that the Tsar was
killed by Jews, and that there was an official order for the massacre of Jews, but
the authorities were hiding this.547 On 23 April there was a brief pogrom in
Kiev, but it was soon stopped with military forces. However, in Kiev on 26
April a new pogrom broke out, and by the following day it had spread to the
Kiev suburbs and this was the largest pogrom in the whole chain of them; but
they ended without human fatalities.548 (Another tome of the same
Encyclopedia reports the opposite, that several Jews were killed.549)
After Kiev, pogroms took place again in approximately fifty settlements in
the Kiev Guberniya, during which property of the Jews was subjected to
plunder, and in isolated cases battery occurred. At the end of the same April a
pogrom took place in Konotop, caused mainly by workers and railroad hands,
accompanied by one human fatality; in Konotop there were instances of self-
defense from the Jewish side. There was still an echo of the Kiev Pogrom in
Zhmerinka, in several settlements of Chernigov Guberniya; at the start of
May, in the small town of Smel, where it was suppressed with arriving troops
the next day (an apparel store was plundered). With echoes in the course of
May, at the start of summer pogroms still broke out in separate areas in
Ekaterinoslav and Poltava guberniyas (Aleksandrovsk, Romni, Nezhin,
Pereyaslavl, and Borisov). Insignificant disorders took place somewhere in
Melitopol Uezd. There were cases, when peasants immediately compensated
Jews for their losses.550
The pogrom movement in Kishinev, which began on 20 April, was nipped
in the bud.551 There were no pogroms in all of Byelorussia not in that year,
nor in the following years,552 although in Minsk a panic started among the Jews
during rumors about pogroms in the Southwestern Krai on account of a
completely unexpected occurrence.553

545 L. Praysman [Priceman]. Pogromi i samooborona. [Pogroms and Self-defense] //22:

Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v
Izraile [Public-Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in
Israel]. Tel-Aviv, 1986/87, No51, p. 174.
546 Kratkaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya (dale KEE) [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (from
here SJE)]: [V10 T.] Jerusalem, 1976-2001. T 6, p. 562.
547 EE [JE], T 12, p. 612.
548 KEE [SJE], T 4, p.256.
549 Ibid. T 6, p. 562.
550 EE [JE], T 12, p 612-613.
551 Ibid., p. 612.
552 KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 325.
 And next in Odessa. Only Odessa already knew Jewish pogroms in the 19th
Century in 1821, 1859, and 1871. Those were sporadic events, caused mainly
by unfriendliness toward Jews on the part of the local Greek population,554 that
is, on account of the commercial competition of the Jews and Greeks; in 1871
there was a three-day pogrom of hundreds of Jewish taverns, shops, and homes,
but without human fatalities.
I.G. Orshanskiy writes in more detail about this pogrom, and states, that
Jewish property was being intentionally destroyed: heaps of watches from the
jewelers they did not steal them, but carried them out to the roadway and
smashed them. He agrees that the nerve center of the pogrom was hostility
toward the Jews on the part of the Greek merchants, particularly owing to the
fact, that after the Crimean War the Odessa Jews took the grocery trade and
colonial commodities from the Greeks. But there was a general dislike toward
the Jews on the part of the Christian population of Odessa. This hostility
manifested far more consciously and prominently among the intelligent and
affluent class than among the common working people. You see, however, that
different peoples get along in Odessa; why then did only Jews arouse general
dislike toward themselves, which sometimes turns into severe hatred? One
high school teacher explained to his class: The Jews are engaged in incorrect
economic relations with the rest of population. Orshanskiy objects that such an
explanation removes the heavy burden of moral responsibility. He sees the
same reason in the psychological influence of Russian legislation, which singles
out the Jews, namely and only to place restrictions on them. And in the attempt
of Jews to break free from restrictions, people see impudence, insatiableness,
and grabbing.555
As a result, in 1881 the Odessa administration, already having experience
with pogroms which other local authorities did not have immediately put
down disorders which were reignited several times, and the masses of thugs
were placed in vessels and dragged away from the shore556 a highly
resourceful method. (In contradiction to the pre-revolutionary, the modern
Encyclopedia writes, that this time the pogrom in Odessa continued for three
days).557
The pre-revolutionary Encyclopedia recognizes, that the government
considered it necessary to decisively put down violent attempts against the
Jews;558 so it was the new Minister of Interior Affairs, Count N.P. Ignatiev,

553 S. Ginzburg. Nastroeniya evreyskoy molodezhi v 80-kh godakh proshlogo stoletiya.

[The attitudes of Jewish Youth in the 80s Years of the Previous Century] // Evreyskiy mir
[Jewish World]: Sb 2 [Anthology 2] (dalee EM-2) [from here JW-2]. New York: Soyuz
russkikh evreyev v Nyu Yorke [Union of Russian Jews in New York], 1944, p. 383.
554 EE [EJ], T 12, p 611.
555 I. Orshanskiy. Evrei v Rossii: Ocherki i issledovaniya [The Jews in Russia: Essays and
Research]. Vip. 1. Sankt-Peterburg, 1872, p 212-222.
556 EE [EJ] T 12,, p.613.
557 KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 562.
558 EE [JE] T 1, p. 826.
(who replaced Loris-Melikov in May, 1881), who firmly suppressed the
pogroms; although it was not easy to cope with rising disturbances of epidemic
strength in view of the complete unexpectedness of events, the extremely
small number of Russian police at that time (Russias police force was then
incomparably smaller than the police forces in the West European states, much
less than those in the Soviet Union), and the rare stationing of military garrisons
in those areas. Firearms were used for defense of the Jews against
pogromists.559 There was firing in the crowd, and [people] were shot dead. For
example, in Borisov soldiers shot and killed several peasants. 560 Also, in
Nezhin troops stopped a pogrom, by opening fire at the crowd of peasant
pogromists; several people were killed and wounded.561 In Kiev 1,400 people
were arrested.562
All this together indicates a highly energetic picture of enforcement. But
the government acknowledged its insufficient preparedness. An official
statement said that during the Kiev pogrom the measures to restrain the crowds
were not taken with sufficient timeliness and energy. 563 In a report to His
Majesty in June 1881 the Director of the Police Department, V.K. Plehve,
named the fact that courts martial treated the accused extremely leniently and
in general dealt with the matter quite superficially as one of the reasons for
the development and insufficiently quick suppression of the disorders
Alexander III made a note in the report: This is inexcusable.564
But forthwith and later it did not end without accusations, that the pogroms
were arranged by the government itself a completely unsubstantiated
accusation, much less absurd, since in April 1881 the same liberal reformer
Loris Melikov headed the government, and all his people were in power in the
upper administration. After 1917, a group of researchers S. Dubnov, G.
Krasniy-Admoni, and S. Lozinskiy thoroughly searched for the proof in all the
opened government archives and only found the opposite, beginning with the
fact that, Alexander III himself demanded an energetic investigation. (But to
utterly ruin Tsar Alexander IIIs reputation a nameless someone invented the
malicious slander: that the Tsar unknown to anyone, when, and under what
circumstances said: And I admit, that I myself am happy, when they beat
Jews! And this was accepted and printed in migr liberation brochures, it
went into liberal folklore, and even until now, after 100 years, it has turned up
in publications as historically reliable.565 And even in the Short Jewish
559 Yu. Gessen, T 12, p. 222.
560 EE [JE], T 12, p. 613.
561 KEE [SJE], T 6, p 562-563.
562 S.M. Dubnov. Noveyshaya Istoriya: Ot frantsuzkoy revolutsii 1789 goda do mirovoy voyni
1914 goda [A New History: from the French Revolution of 1789 to the First World War of
1914]: V3 T. Berlin: Grani, 1923. T3 (1881-1914), p. 107.
563 EE [JE], T 6, p. 612.
564 R. Kantor*. Aleksandr III o evreyskikh pogromakh 1881-1883 gg. [Aleksandr III on the
Jewish Pogroms, 1881-1883]//Evreyskaya letopis [The Jewish Chronicle]: Sb. [Anthology]
1. M.; Pg.: Paduga, 1923, p. 154.
565 A. Lvov // Novaya gazeta [New Gazette], New York, 1981, No70, 5-11 September, p. 26.
Encyclopedia: The authorities acted in close contact with the arrivals, 566 that
is, with outsiders. And it was clear to Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana that it was
obvious: all matters were in the hands of the authorities. If they wanted one
they could bring on a pogrom; if they didnt want one there would be no
pogrom.)567
As a matter of fact, not only was there no incitement on the part of the
government, but as Gessen points out: the rise of numerous pogrom brigades
in a short time in a vast area and the very character of their actions, eliminates
the thought of the presence of a single organizational center.568
And here is another contemporary, living testimony from a pretty much
unexpected quarter from The Black Repartitions Workers Leaflet; that is, a
proclamation to the people, in June 1881. The revolutionary leaflet thus
described the picture: Not only all the governors, but all other officials, police,
troops, priests, zemstvo [elected district councils], and journalists stood up for
the Kulak-JewsThe government protects the person and property of the
Jews; threats are announced by the governors that the perpetrators of the riots
will be dealt with according to the full extent of the lawThe police looked for
people who were in the crowd [of pogromists], arrested them, dragged them to
the police stationSoldiers and Cossacks used the rifle butt and the whip
they beat the people with rifles and whipssome were prosecuted and locked
up in jail or sent to do hard labor, and others were thrashed with birches on the
spot by the police.569
Next year, in the spring of 1881, pogroms renewed but already not in the
same numbers and not in the same scale as in the previous year. 570 The Jews
of the city of Balta experienced a particularly heavy pogrom, riots also
occurred in the Baltskiy Uezd and still in a few others. However, according to
the number of incidents, and according to their character, the riots of 1882 were
significantly inferior to the movement of 1881 the destruction of the property
of Jews was not so frequent a phenomenon.571 The pre-revolutionary Jewish
Encyclopedia reports, that at the time of the pogrom in Balta, one Jew was
killed.572
A famous Jewish contemporary wrote: in the pogroms of the 1880s, they
robbed unlucky Jews, and they beat them, but they did not kill them.573

566 KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 563.

567 Mezhdunarodnaya evreyskaya gazeta [International Jewish Gazette], 1992, March, No6
(70), p. 7.
568 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 215.
569 Zerno: Rabochiy listok [The Truth, (Grain of)]: Workers Leaflet, June 1881,
No3 //Istoriko-Revolyutsioniy Sbornik (dalee IPC) [Historical-Revolutionary Anthology
(from here HRA)] / Under the Editorship of V.I. Nevskiy: V 3 T.M.; L.: GIZ, 1924-1926.
T 2, p. 360-361.
570 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 217.
571 EE [JE], T 12, p. 614.
572 Ibid. T 3, p. 723.
573 M. Krol. Kishinevskiy pogrom 1903 goda i Kishinevskiy pogromniy protsess [The Kishinev
Pogrom of 1903 and the Kishinev Pogrom Process] // EM-2, p. 370.
(According to other sources, 6 7 deaths were recorded.) At the time of the
1880 1890s, no one remembered mass killings and rapes. However, more than
a half-century passed and many publicists, not having the need to delve into
the ancient [official] Russian facts, but then having an extensive and credulous
audience, now began to write about massive and premeditated atrocities. For
example, we read in Max Raisins frequently published book: that the pogroms
of 1881 led to the rape of women, murder, and maiming of thousands of men,
women, and children. It was later revealed, that these riots were inspired and
thought out by the very government, which had incited the pogromists and
hindered the Jews in their self-defense.574
A G.B. Sliozberg, so rationally familiar with the workings of the Russian
state apparatus suddenly declared out-of-country in 1933, that the pogroms of
1881 originated not from below, but from above, with Minister Ignatiev (who at
that time was still not Minister the old mans memory failed him), and there
was nodoubt, that threads of the work of the pogrom could be found in the
Department of Police575 thus the experienced jurist afforded himself
dangerous and ugly groundlessness.
And yes, here in a serious present-day Jewish journal from a modern
Jewish author we find that, contrary to all the facts and without bringing in new
documents: that in Odessa in 1881 a three-day pogrom took place; and that in
the Balta pogrom there was direct participation of soldiers and police; 40
Jews were killed and seriously wounded, 170 lightly wounded.576 (We just read
in the old Jewish Encyclopedia: in Balta one Jew was killed, and wounded
several. But in the new Jewish Encyclopedia, after a century from the events,
we read: in Balta soldiers joined the pogromistsSeveral Jews were killed,
hundreds wounded, many women were raped.577) Pogroms are too savage and
horrible a form of reprisal, for one to so lightly manipulate casualty figures.
There spattered, basted is it necessary to begin excavations again?
The causes of those first pogroms were persistently examined and
discussed by contemporaries. As early as 1872, after the Odessa pogrom, the
General-Governor of the Southwestern Krai warned in a report, that similar
events could happen in his Krai also, for here the hatred and hostility toward
Jews has an historical basis, and only the material dependence of the peasants
upon Jews together with the measures of the administration currently holds back
an indignant explosion of the Russian population against the Jewish tribe. The
General-Governor reduced the essence of the matter to economics, as he
reckoned and evaluated the business and manufacturing property in Jewish
hands in the Southwestern Krai, and pointed to the fact, that, being increasingly
engaged in the rent of landed estates, the Jews have re-rented and shifted this
574 Max Raisin. A History of the Jews in Modern Times. 2nd ed., New York: Hebrew
Publishing Company, 1923, p. 163.
575 G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney: Zapiski russkogo evreya [Things of Days Bygone:
Notes of a Russian Jew]: V 3 T. Paris, 1933-1934. T 1, p. 118; T 3, p.53.
576 L. Praysman // 22, 1986, No51, p. 175.
577 KEE [SJE] T 6, p. 562-563.
land to the peasants on very difficult terms. And such a causation received
wide recognition in 1881 which was full of pogroms.578
In the spring of 1881, Loris-Melikov also reported to His Majesty: The
deep hatred of the local population toward the Jews who enslave it lies at the
foundation of the present disorders, but ill-intentioned people have undoubtedly
exploited this opportunity.579
And thus explained the newspapers of the time: Examining the causes
which provoked the pogroms, only a few organs of the periodical press refer to
the tribal and religious hatred; the rest think that the pogrom movement arose
on economic grounds; in so doing, some see a protest in the unruly behaviors
directed specially against the Jews, in light of their economic dominance over
the Russian population. Yet others maintained that the mass of the people, in
general squeezed economically, looked for someone to vent their anger out on
and the Jews fit this purpose because of their having little rights. 580 A
contemporary of these pogroms, the cited educator, V. Portugalov, also said In
the Jewish pogroms of the 1880s, I saw an expression of protest by the peasants
and the urban poor against social injustice.581
Ten years later, Yu. I. Gessen emphasized, that the Jewish population of
the southern Guberniyas in general was able to find sources of livelihood
among the Jewish capitalists, while the local peasantry went through extremely
difficult times as it did not have enough land, to which the wealthy Jews
contributed in part, by re-renting the landowners lands and raising the rental fee
beyond the ability of the peasants.582
Let us not leave out still another witness, known for his impartiality and
thoughtfulness, whom no one accused of being reactionary or of anti-
Semitism Gleb Uspenskiy. At the beginning of the 1980s, he wrote: The
Jews were beaten up, namely because they amassed a fortune on other peoples
needs, other peoples work, and did not make bread with their own hands;
under canes and lashesyou see, the people endured the rule of the Tatar and
the German but when the Yid began to harass the people for a ruble they did
not take it!583
But we should note that when soon after the pogroms a deputation of
prominent Jews from the capital, headed by Baron G. Gintsburg, came to
Alexander III at the beginning of May 1881, His Majesty confidently estimated
that in the criminal disorders in the south of Russia, the Jews served only as a
pretext, that this business was the hand of the anarchists.584 And in those same

578 Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 216, 220.

579 R. Kantor* // Evreyskaya letopis [The Jewish Chonicle]: Sb. [Anthology] 1, M.; Pg.:
Raduga, 1923, p. 152.
580 Yu. Gessen. T 2, p 218.
581 KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 692.
582 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p 219-220.
583 Gleb Uspenskiy. Vlast zemli [The Authority of the Land]. L.: Khudozh. Lit., 1967, p. 67,
88.
584 EE* [JE], T 1, p. 826.
days, the brother of the Tsar, the Grand Prince Vladimir Alexandrovich,
announced to the same Gintsburg, that: the disorders, as is now known by the
government, have their sources not exclusively agitation against the Jews, but
an aspiration to the work of sedition in general. And the General-Governor of
the Southwestern Krai also reported, that the general excited condition of the
population is the responsibility of propagandists. 585 And in this the authorities
turned out to be well-informed. Such quick statements from them reveal that the
authorities did not waste time in the investigation. But because of the usual
misunderstanding of the Russian administration of that time, and its
incomprehension of the role of publicity, they did not report the results of the
investigation to the public. Sliozberg blames that on the central authority in that
it did not even make attempts to vindicate itself of accusations of permitting
the pogroms.586 (True, but after all, it accused the government, as we saw, of
deliberate instigation and guidance of the pogroms. It is absurd to start with
proof that you are not a criminal.)
Yet not everyone wanted to believe that the incitements came from the
revolutionaries. Here a Jewish memoirist from Minsk recalls: for Jews,
Alexander II was not a Liberator he did not do away with the Jewish Pale of
Settlement, and although the Jews sincerely mourned his death, they did not say
a single bad word against the revolutionaries; they spoke with respect about
them, that they were driven by heroism and purity of thought. And during the
spring and summer pogroms of 1881, they did not in any way believe that the
socialists incited toward them: it was all because of the new Tsar and his
government. The government wished for the pogroms, it had to have a
scapegoat. And now, when reliable witnesses from the South later indeed
confirmed that the socialists engineered them, they continued to believe that it
was the fault of the government.587
However, toward the start of the 20th Century, thorough authors admitted:
In the press there is information about the participation of separate members of
the party, Narodnaya Volya [Peoples Will] in the pogroms; but the extent of
this participation is still not clear. Judging by the party organ, members of
the party considered the pogroms as a sort of revolutionary activity, suggesting
that the pogroms were training the people for revolutionary action; 588 that the
action which was easiest of all to direct against the Jews now, could, in its
further development, come down on the nobles and officials. Accordingly,
proclamations calling for an attack on the Jews were prepared. 589 Today, it is
only superficially talked about, like something generally known: the active
propaganda of the Narodniks (both members of Narodnaya Volya and the Black

585 Ibid*, T 12, p. 614

586 G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney [Things of Days Bygone], T 1, p. 106.
587 A. Lesin. Epizodi iz moey zhizni [Episodes from My Life] // EM-2, p. 385-387.
588 EE [JE], T 12, p. 617-618.
589 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 218.
Repartition was prepared to stir rebellion to any fertile soil, including anti-
Semitism.590
From emigration, Tkachev, irrepressible predecessor of Lenin in
conspiratorial tactics, welcomed the broadening pogrom movement.
Indeed, the Narodovoltsi (and the weaker Chernoperedeltsi [members of
Black Repartition) could not wait much longer after the murder of the Tsar
which did not cause instantaneous mass revolution which had been predicted
and expected by them. With such a state of general bewilderment of minds after
the murder of the Tsar-Liberator, only a slight push was needed for the reeling
minds to re-incline into any direction.
In that generally unenlightened time, that re-inclination could probably
have happened in different ways. (For example, there was then such a popular
conception, that the Tsar was killed by nobles, in revenge for the liberation of
the peasants.) In Ukraine, anti-Jewish motives existed. Still, it is possible the
first movements of spring 1881 anticipated the plot of the Narodovoltsi but
right then and there they suggested which way the wind would blow: it went
against the Jews never lose touch with the people! A movement from the heart
of the masses Of course! Why not use it? Beat the Jews, and later we will get
to the landowners! And now the unsuccessful pogroms in Odessa and
Ekaterinoslav were most likely exaggerated by the Narodniks. And the
movement of the pogromists along the railroads, and participation of the
railroad workers in the pogroms everything points to the instigation of
pogroms by easily mobile agitators, especially with that particularly inciting
rumor that they are hiding the order of the Tsar, namely to beat the Jews for
the murder of his father. (The public prosecutor of the Odessa Judicial Bureau
thus emphasized, that, in perpetrating the Jewish pogroms, the people were
completely convinced of the legality of their actions, firmly believing in the
existence of a Tsars decree, allowing and even authorizing the destruction of
Jewish property.591 And according to Gessen, the realization that had taken
root in the people, that the Jews stood outside of the law, and that the authorities
defending the Jews could not come out against the people 592 had now taken
effect. The Narodovoltsi wanted to use this imaginary notion.)
A few such revolutionary leaflets are preserved for history. Such a leaflet
from 30 August 1881 is signed by the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya
Volya and reads straight away in Ukrainian: Who seized the land, forests, and
taverns? The Yid From whom, muzhik [peasant], do you have to ask for
access to your land, at times hiding tears?From Yids. Wherever you look,
wherever you ask the Yids are everywhere. The Yid insults people and cheats
them; drinks their bloodand it concludes with the appeal: Honest working
people! Free yourselves!593 And later, in the newspaper, Narodnaya Volya,
590 L. Praisman // 22, 1986, No51, p. 173.
591 EE [JE]*, T 1, p. 826.
592 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 215.
593 Katorga i ssilka: Istoriko-revolyutsioniy vestnik [Hard Labor and Exile: The Historical-
Revolutionary Bulletin] Book 48, Moscow, 1928, p. 50-52.
No. 6: All attention of the defending people is now concentrated, hastily and
passionately, on the merchants, tavern keepers, and moneylenders; in a word, on
the Jews, on this local bourgeoisie, who avariciously rob working people like
nowhere else. And after, in a forward to a leaflet of the Narodnaya Volya
(already in 1883), some corrections: the pogroms began as a nationwide
movement, but not against the Jews as Jews, but against Yids; that is, exploiter
peoples.594 And in the said leaflet, Zerno, the Chernoperedeltsi: The working
people cannot withstand the Jewish robbery anymore. Wherever one goes,
almost everywhere he runs into the Jew-Kulak. The Jew owns the taverns and
pubs; the Jew rents land from the landowners, and then re-rents it at three times
higher to the peasant; he buys the wholesale yields of crop and engages in usury,
and in the process charges such interest rates, that the people outright call them
Yiddish [rates]This is our blood! said the peasants to the police officials,
who came to seize the Jewish property back from them. But the same
correction is in Zerno: and far from all among the Jews are wealthynot
all of them are kulaksDiscard with the hostility toward differing peoples and
differing faiths and unite with them against the common enemy: the Tsar,
the police, the landowners, and the capitalists.595
However these corrections already came late. Such leaflets were later
reproduced in Elizavetgrad and other cities of the South; and in the South
Russian Workers Soviet in Kiev, where the pogroms were already over, the
Narodniks tried to stir them up again in 1883, hoping to renew, and through
them to spread the Russian-wide revolution.
Of course, the pogrom wave in the South was extensively covered in the
contemporary press in the capital. In the reactionary Moskovskiye Vedomosti,
M.N. Katkov, who always defended the Jews, branded the pogroms as
originating with malicious intriguers, who intentionally darkened the popular
consciousness, forcing people to solve the Jewish Question, albeit not by a path
of thorough study, but with the help of raised fists.596
The articles by prominent writers stand out. I.S. Aksakov, a steadfast
opponent of complete civil liberty for the Jews, attempted to warn the
government against too daring steps on this path, as early as the end of the
1850s. When a law came out allowing Jews with higher degrees to be employed
in the administration, he objected (1862) saying that the Jews are a bunch of
people, who completely reject Christian teachings, the Christian ideal and code
of morality (and, therefore, the entire foundation of Russian society), and
practice a hostile and antagonistic faith. He was against political emancipation
of the Jews, though he did not reject their equalization in purely civil rights, in
order that the Jewish people could be provided complete freedom in daily life,
self-management, development, enlightenment, commerce, and even allowing
them to reside in all of Russia. In 1867 he wrote, that economically speaking

594 D. Shub. Evrei v russkoy revolyutsii [Jews in the Russian Revolution] // EM-2, p. 129-130.
595 IPC [IRS], T 2, p. 360-361.
596 EE [JE], T 9, p. 381.
we should talk not about emancipation for Jews, but rather about the
emancipation of Russians from Jews. He noted the blank indifference of the
liberal press to the conditions of peasants life and their needs. And now
Aksakov explained the wave of pogroms in 1881 as a manifestation of the
popular anger against Jewish yoke over the Russian local people; thats why
during the pogroms, there was an absence of theft, only the destruction of
property and a kind of simple-hearted conviction in the justness of their
actions; and he repeated, that it was worth putting the question not about Jews
enjoying equal rights with Christians, but about the equal rights of Christians
with Jews, about abolishing factual inequality of the Russian population in the
face of the Jews.597
On the other hand, an article by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin was full of
indignation: The history has never drawn on its pages a question more
difficult, more devoid of humanity, and more tortuous, than the Jewish
QuestionThere is not a more inhumane and mad legend than that coming out
from the dark ravines of the distant pastcarrying the mark of disgrace,
alienation, and hatredWhatever the Jew undertakes, he always remains
stigmatized.598 Shchedrin did not deny, that a significant contingent of
moneylenders and exploiters of various kinds are enlisted from the Jews, but
he asked, can we really place blame on the whole Jewish tribe, on account of
one type?599
Examining the whole discussion of that time, a present-day Jewish author
writes: the liberal, and conditionally speaking, progressive press was defending
the thugs.600 And the pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia comes to a similar
conclusion: Yet in the progressive circles, sympathies toward the woes of the
Jewish people were not displayed sufficiently they looked at this catastrophe
from the viewpoint of the aggressor, presenting him as destitute peasant, and
completely ignoring the moral sufferings and material situation of the mobbed
Jewish people. And even the radical Patriotic Notes evaluated it thus: the
people rose up against the Jews because they took upon themselves the role of
pioneers of Capitalism, because they live according to the new truth and
confidently draw their own comfortable prosperity from that new source at the
expense of the surrounding community, and therefore, it was necessary that
the people are protected from the Jew, and the Jew from the people, and for
this the condition of the peasant needs to be improved.601
In A Letter from a Christian on the Jewish Question, published in the
Jewish magazine Rassvet, D. Mordovtsev, a writer sympathetic to the Jews,

597 I.S. Aksakov. Sochineniya [Essays]: V 7 T. Moscow, 1886-1887. T 3, p. 690, 693, 708, 716,
717, 719, 722.
598 M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Iyulskoe veyanie [The Julys Spirit] // Otechestvennie zapiski
[Homeland Notes], 1882, No 8.
599 EE [JE], T 16, p. 142.
600 Sh. Markish. O evreyskoy nenavisti k Rossii [About Jewish Hatred toward Russia] // 22,
1984, No38, p. 216.
601 EE [JE], T 2, p. 741.
pessimistically urged the Jews to emigrate to Palestine and America, seeing
only in this a solution to the Jewish Question in Russia.602
Jewish social-political journalism and the memoirs of this period expressed
grievance because the printed publications against the Jews, both from the right
and from the revolutionary left, followed immediately after the pogroms. Soon
(and all the more energetically because of the pogroms) the government would
strengthen restrictive measures against the Jews. It is necessary to take note of
and understand this insult.
It is necessary to thoroughly examine the position of the government. The
general solutions to the problem were being sought in discussions in
government and administrative spheres. In a report to His Majesty, N.P.
Ignatiev, the new Minister of Internal Affairs, outlined the scope of the problem
for the entire previous reign: Recognizing the harm to the Christian population
from the Jewish economic activity, their tribal exclusivity and religious
fanaticism, in the last 20 years the government has tried to blend the Jews with
the rest of the population using a whole row of initiatives, and has almost made
the Jews equal in rights with the native inhabitants. However, the present anti-
Jewish movement incontrovertibly proves, that despite all the efforts of the
government, the relations between the Jews and the native population of these
regions remain abnormal as in the past, because of the economic issues: after
the easing of civil restrictions, the Jews have not only seized commerce and
trade, but they have acquired significant landed property. Moreover, because of
their cohesion and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed all their
efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but
primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding
population. And now, after we have crushed the disorders and defended the
Jews from violence, it seems just and urgent to adopt no less energetic
measures for the elimination of these abnormal conditionsbetween the native
inhabitants and the Jews, and to protect the population from that harmful
activity of the Jews.603
And in accordance with that, in November 1881, the governmental
commissions, comprised of representatives of all social strata and groups
(including Jewish), were established in 15 guberniyas of the Jewish Pale of
Settlement, and also in Kharkov Guberniya.604 The commissions ought to
examine the Jewish Question and propose their ideas on its resolution. 605 It was
expected that the commissions will provide answers on many factual questions,
such as: In general, which aspects of Jewish economic activity are most
harmful for the way of life of the native population in the region? Which
difficulties hinder the enforcement of laws regulating the purchase and rental of
land, trade in spirits, and usury by Jews? Which changes are necessary to

602 KEE [SJE], T 5, p. 463.

603 Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 220-221.
604 EE [JE], T 1, p. 827.
605 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 221.
eliminate evasion of these laws by Jews? Which legislative and administrative
measures in general are necessary to negate the harmful influence of the Jews
in various kinds of economic activity?606 The liberal Palenskaya inter-
ministerial High Commission established two years later for the revision of
laws on the Jews, noted that the harm from the Jews, their bad qualities, and
traits were somewhat recognized a priori in the program that was given to the
provincial commissions.607
Yet many administrators in those commissions were pretty much liberal as
they were brought up in the stormy epoch of Tsar Alexander IIs reforms, and
moreover, public delegates participated also. And Ignatievs ministry received
rather inconsistent answers. Several commissions were in favor of abolishing
the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Individual members [of the commissions] and
they were not few declared that the only just solution to the Jewish Question
was the general repeal of all restrictions. 608 On the other hand, the Vilnius
Commission stated that because of mistakenly understood notion of universal
human equality wrongly applied to Judaism to the detriment of the native
people, the Jews managed to seize economic supremacy; that the Jewish law
permits [them] to profit from any weakness and gullibility of gentile. Let the
Jews renounce their seclusion and isolation, let them reveal the secrets of their
social organization allowing light where only darkness appeared to outsiders;
and only then can one think about opening new spheres of activity to the Jews,
without fear that Jews wish to use the benefits of the nation, [while] not being
members of the nation, and not taking upon themselves a share of the national
burden.609
Regarding residence in the villages and hamlets, the commissions found it
necessary to restrict the rights of the Jews: to forbid them to live there
altogether or to make it conditional upon the agreement of the village
communities. Some commissions recommended completely depriving the Jews
of the right to possess real estate outside of the cities and small towns, and
others proposed establishing restrictions. The commissions showed the most
unanimity in prohibiting any Jewish monopoly on alcohol sales in villages. The
Ministry gathered the opinions of the governors, and with rare exceptions,
comments from the regional authorities were not favorable to the Jews: to
protect the Christian population from so haughty a tribe as the Jews; one can
never expect the Jewish tribe to dedicate its talentsto the benefit of the
homeland; Talmudic morals do not place any obstacles before the Jews if it is
a question of making money at the expense of someone outside of the tribe.
Yet the Kharkov General-Governor did not consider it possible to take
restrictive measures against the whole Jewish population, without

606 EE [JE], T 1, p. 827.

607 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 221.
608 EE [JE], T 1, p. 827-828.
609 Ibid*. T 2, p. 742-743.
distinguishing the lawful from the guilty; he proposed to expand the right of
movement for Jews and spread enlightenment among them.610
That same autumn, by Ignatievs initiative, a special Committee on the
Jews was established (the ninth by count already, with three permanent
members, two of them professors), with the task of analyzing the materials of
the provincial commissions and in order to draft a legislative bill. 611 (The
previous Commission for the Organization of the Life of the Jews that is,
the eighth committee on Jews, which existed since 1872 was soon abolished,
due to mismatch between its purpose and the present state of the Jewish
Question.) The new Committee proceeded with the conviction that the goal of
integrating the Jews with the rest of the population, toward which the
government had striven for the last 25 years, had turned out to be
unattainable.612 Therefore, the difficulty of resolving the complicated Jewish
Question compels [us] to turn for the instruction to the old times, when various
novelties did not yet penetrate neither ours, nor foreign legislations, and did not
bring with them the regrettable consequences, which usually appear upon
adoption of new things that are contrary to the national spirit of the country.
From time immemorial the Jews were considered aliens, and should be
considered as such.613
Gessen comments: the reactionary could not go further. And if you were
so concerned about the national foundations then why you didnt worry about
genuine emancipation of the peasantry during the past 20 years?
And it was also true that Tsar Alexander IIs emancipation of the peasants
proceeded in a confused, unwholesome and corrupt environment.
However: in government circles there were still people, who did not
consider it possible, in general, to change the policy of the preceding reign 614
and they were in important posts and strong. And some ministers opposed
Ignatievs proposals. Seeing resistance, he divided the proposed measures into
fundamental (for which passing in the regular way required moving through the
government and the State Council) and provisional, which could by law be
adopted through an accelerated and simplified process. To convince the rural
population that the government protects them from the exploitation by Jews, the
permanent residence of Jews outside of their towns and shtetls (and the
government was powerless to protect them from pogroms in the scattered
villages), and buying and renting real estate there, and also trading in spirits
was prohibited. And regarding the Jews already living there: it granted to the
rural communities the right to evict the Jews from the villages, based upon a
verdict of the village meeting. But other ministers particularly the Minister of
Finance, N. Kh. Bunge, and the Minister of Justice, D.N. Nabokov, did not let
Ignatiev implement these measures: they rejected the bill, claiming that it was
610 Ibid*, T 1, p. 827-828.
611 Ibid, T 9, p. 690-691.
612 EE [JE], T 2, p. 744.
613 Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 222.
614 EE [JE] T 2, p. 744.
impossible to adopt such extensive prohibitive measures, without debating
them within the usual legislative process.615
So much for the boundless and malicious arbitrariness of the Russian
autocracy.
Ignatievs fundamental measures did not pass, and the provisional ones
passed only in a greatly truncated form. Rejected were the provisions to evict
the Jews already living in the villages, to forbid their trade in alcohol or their
renting and buying land in villages. And only because of the fear that the
pogroms might happen again around Easter of 1882, a temporary measure (until
passing of comprehensive legislation about the Jews) was passed which
prohibited the Jews again, henceforth to take residence and enter into
ownership, or make use of real estate property outside of their towns and shtetls
(that is, in the villages), and also forbade them to trade on Sundays and
Christian holidays.616 Concerning the Jewish ownership of local real estate, the
government acted to suspend temporarily the completion of sales and purchase
agreements and loans in the name of the Jewsthe notarizationof real estate
rental agreements and the proxy management and disposal of property by
them.617 This mere relic of Ignatievs proposed measures was approved on 3
May 1882, under title of Temporary Regulations (known as the May
Regulations). And Ignatiev himself went into retirement after a month and his
Committee on the Jews ceased its brief existence, and a new Minister of
Internal Affairs, Count D.A. Tolstoy, issued a stern directive against possible
new pogroms, placing full responsibility on the provincial authorities for the
timely prevention of disorders.618
Thus, according to the Temporary Regulations of 1882, the Jews who had
settled in rural regions before the 3rd of May, were not evicted; their economic
activity there was essentially unrestricted. Moreover, these regulations only
applied to the guberniyas of permanent Jewish settlement, not to the
guberniyas of the Russian interior. And these restrictions did not extend to
doctors, attorneys, and engineers i.e., individuals with the right of universal
residence according to educational requirement. These restrictions also did not
affect any existing Jewish colonies engaged in agriculture; and there was still
a considerable (and later growing) list of rural settlements, according to which,
in exception to the Temporary Regulations, Jews were permitted to settle.619
After issuance of the Regulations, inquiries began flowing from the
regions and Senate explanations were issued in response. For example: that
journeys through rural regions, temporary stops and even temporary stays of
individuals without the right of permanent residence are not prohibited by the
Law of 3 May 1882; that only the rent of real estates and agrarian lands is
prohibited, while rent of all other types of real estate property, such as
615 Ibid. T 1, p. 829-830.
616 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 226-227; KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 341.
617 EE [JE], T 5, p. 815-817.
618 Ibid. T 12, p. 616.
619 EE* [JE], T 5, p 815-817.
distillation plants, buildings for trade and industry, and living quarters is not
prohibited. Also, the Senate deems permissible the notarization of lumbering
agreements with the Jews, even if the clearing of a forest was scheduled for a
prolonged period, and even if the buyer of the forest was allowed use of the
underbrush land; and finally, that violations of the Law of 3rd May would not
be subjected to criminal prosecution.620
It is necessary to recognize these Senate clarifications as mitigating, and in
many respects, good-natured; in the 1880s the Senate wrestled with the
arbitrary interpretation of the laws.621 However, the regulations forbidding the
Jews to settle outside the towns and shtetls and/or to own real estate
extremely restricted alcohol distillation business by Jews, as Jewish
participation in distillation before the 3rd May Regulations was very
significant.622
It was exactly this measure to restrict the Jews in the rural wine trade (first
proposed as early as 1804) that stirred universal indignation at the
extraordinary severity of the May Regulations, even though it was only
implemented, and incompletely at that, in 1882. The government stood before a
difficult choice: to expand the wine industry in the face of peasant proneness [to
drunkeness] and thus to deepen the peasant poverty, or to restrict the free
growth of this trade by letting the Jews already living in the villages to remain
while stopping others from coming. And that choice restriction was deemed
cruel.
Yet how many Jews lived in rural regions in 1882? We have already come
across post-revolutionary estimates from the state archives: one third of the
entire Jewish population of the Pale lived in villages, another third lived in
shtetls, 29% lived in mid-size cities, and 5% in the major cities.623 So the
Regulations now prevented the village third from further growth?
Today these May Regulations are portrayed as a decisive and irrevocably
repressive boundary of Russian history. A Jewish author writes: this was the
first push toward emigration! first internal migration, then massive overseas
migration.624 The first cause of Jewish emigration was the Ignatiev
Temporary Regulations, which violently threw around one million Jews out of
the hamlets and villages, and into the towns and shtetls of the Jewish Pale.625

620 Ibid. p. 816-819.

621 KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 342.
622 EE [JE], T 5, p. 610-611.
623 Yu. Larin. Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR [Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR]. M.; L.: GIZ,
1929, p. 49-50.
624 I.M. Dizhur. Evrei v ekonomicheskoy zhizni Rossii [Jews in the Economic Life of Russia] //
[Sankt-Peterburg.] Kniga o russkom evreystve: Ot 1860-kh godov do Revolyutsii 1917 g.
[The Book of Russian Jewry: from the 1860s to the Revolution of 1917]. (dalee KRE-1)
[henceforth KRE-1]. New York: Soyuz Russkikh Evreyev [Union of Russian Jews], 1960,
p. 160.
625 I.M. Dizhur. Itogi i perspektivi evreyskoy emigratsii [Outcomes and Perspectives of Jewish
Emigration] // EM-2, p. 34.
 Wait a second, how did they throw the Jews out and an entire million at
that? Didnt they apparently only prevent new arrivals? No, no! It was already
picked up and sent rolling: that from 1882 the Jews were not only forbidden to
live in the villages everywhere, but in all the cities, too, except in the 13
guberniyas; that they were moved back to the shtetls of the Pale that is why
the mass emigration of Jews from Russia began!626
Well, set the record straight. The first time the idea about Jewish emigration
from Russia to America voiced was as early as in 1869 at the Conference of the
Alliance (of the World Jewish Union) with the thought that the first who
settled there with the help of the Alliance and local Jews would become a
magnet for their Russian co-religionists.627 Moreover, the beginning of the
emigration [of Jews from Russia] dates back to the mid-19th Century and gains
significant momentum after the pogroms of 1881. But only since the mid-
1890s does emigration become a major phenomenon of Jewish economic life,
assuming a massive scale628 note that it says economic life, not political life.
From a global viewpoint Jewish immigration into the United States in the
19th Century was part of an enormous century-long and worldwide historical
process. There were three successive waves of Jewish emigration to America:
first the Spanish-Portuguese (Sephardic) wave, then the German wave (from
Germany and Austria-Hungary), and only then from Eastern Europe and Russia
(Ashkenazik).629 For reasons not addressed here, a major historical movement of
Jewish emigration to the U.S. took place in the 19th Century, and not only from
Russia. In light of the very lengthy Jewish history, it is difficult to overestimate
the significance of this emigration.
And from the Russian Empire a river of Jewish emigration went from all
the guberniyas that made up the Jewish Pale of Settlement; but Poland,
Lithuania, and Byelorussia gave the greatest number of emigrants;630 meaning
they did not come from Ukraine, which was just experiencing the pogroms. The
reason for this was this emigration was the same throughout overcrowding,
which created inter-Jewish economic competition. Moreover, relying on
Russian state statistics, V. Telnikov turns our attention to the last two decades
of the 19th Century; just after the pogroms of 1881 1882, comparing the
resettlement of Jews from the Western Krai, where there were no pogroms, to
the Southwest, where they were. The latter was numerically not less and was
possibly more than the Jewish departure out of Russia. 631 In addition, in 1880,
626 Yu. Larin. The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR, p. 52-53.
627 EE [JE] T 1, p. 947.
628 Ibid. T 16, p. 264.
629 M. Osherovich. Russkie evrei v Soedinenikh Shtatakh Ameriki [Russian Jews in the United
Statees of America] // KRE-1, p. 287.
630 Ya. D. Leshchinskiy. Evreyskoe naselenie Rossii i evreyskii trud. The Jewish Population of
Russia and Jewish Trouble] // KRE-1, p. 190.
631 Sbornik materialov ob ekonomicheskom polozheniya evreyev v Rossii [An Anthology of
Materials about the Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia]. Sankt-Peterburg.:
Evreyskoe Kolonizatsionnoe Obshchestvo [Jewish Colonization Society], 1904. T 1. p.
xxxiii-xxxv, xiv-xivi.
according to official data, 34,000 Jews lived in the internal guberniyas, while
seventeen years later (according to the census of 1897) there were already
315,000 a nine-fold increase.632
Of course, the pogroms of 1881 1882 caused a shock but was it really a
shock for the whole of Ukraine? For example, Sliozberg writes: The 1881
pogroms did not alarm the Jews in Poltava, and soon they forgot about them.
In the 1880s in Poltava the Jewish youth did not know about the existence of
the Jewish Question, and in general, did not feel isolated from the Russian
youth.633 The pogroms of 1881 82, in their complete suddenness, could have
seemed unrepeatable, and the unchanging Jewish economic pull was prevailing:
go settle hither, where less Jews live.
But undoubtedly and inarguably, a decisive turn of progressive and
educated Jewry away from the hopes of a complete integration with the nation
of Russia and the Russian population began in 1881. G. Aronson even
concluded hastily, that the 1871 Odessa Pogrom shattered the illusions of
assimilation.634 No, it wasnt that way yet! But if, for example, we follow the
biographies of prominent and educated Russian Jews, then around 1881 1882
we will note in many of them a drastic change in their attitudes toward Russia
and about possibilities of complete assimilation. By then it was already clear
and not contested that the pogrom wave was indubitably spontaneous without
any evidence for the complicity of the authorities. On the contrary, the
involvement of the revolutionary narodniks was proven. However, the Jews did
not forgive the Russian Government for these pogroms and never have since.
And although the pogroms originated mainly with the Ukrainian population, the
Russians have not been forgiven and the pogroms have always been tied with
the name of Russia.
The pogroms of the 1880s sobered many [of the advocates] of
assimilation (but not all: the idea of assimilation still remained alive). And
here, other Jewish publicists moved to the other extreme: in general it was
impossible for Jews to live among other peoples, [for] they will always be
looked upon as alien. And the Palestinian Movement beganto grow
quickly.635
It was under the influence of the 1881 pogroms that the Odessa doctor, Lev
Pinsker, published his brochure, Auto-Emancipation. The Appeal of a Russian
Jew to his Fellow Tribesmen (in Berlin in 1882, and anonymously). It made a
huge impression on Russian and West European Jewry. It was an appeal about

632 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 210; EE [JE], T 11, p. 534-539.

633 G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dneyT 1, p. 98, 105.
634 G.Ya. Aronson. V borbe za grazhdanskie i natsionalnie prava: Obshchestvennie techeniya
v russkom evreystve [In the Struggle for the Civil and National Rights: Social Currents in
Russian Jewry] // KRE-1, p. 208.
635 Gershon Svet. Russkie evrei v sionizme i v stroitelstve Palestini i Izrailya [Russian Jews in
Zionism and in the Building of Palestine and Israel] // KRE-1, p. 241-242.
the ineradicable foreignness of Jews in eyes of surrounding peoples. 636 We will
discuss this further in Chapter 7.
P. Akselrod claims that it was then that radical Jewish youths discovered
that Russian society would not accept them as their own and thus they began to
depart from the revolutionary movement. However, this assertion appears to be
too far-fetched. In the revolutionary circles, except the Narodnaya Volya, they
did always thnik of the Jews as their own.
However, despite the cooling of attitudes of the Jewish intelligentsia
toward assimilation, the government, as a result of inertia from Alexander IIs
reign, for a while maintained a sympathetic attitude toward the Jewish problem
and did not yet fully replace it by a harshly-restrictive approach. After the year-
long ministerial activities of Count Ignatiev, who experienced such persistent
opposition on the Jewish Question from liberal forces in the upper
governmental spheres, an Imperial High Commission for Revision of the
Active Laws about the Jews in the Empire was established in the beginning of
1883 or as it was named for its chairman, Count Palen The Palenskaya
Commission (so that by then, it became the tenth such Jewish Committee). It
consisted of fifteen to twenty individuals from the upper administration,
members of ministerial councils, department directors (some were members of
great families, such as Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Golytsin, and Speranskiy), and it
also included seven Jewish experts influential financiers, including Baron
Goratsiy Gintsburg and Samuil Polyakov, and prominent public figures, such as
Ya. Galpern, physiologist and publicist N. Bakst (it is highly likely that the
favorable attitude of the majority of the members of the Commission toward
resolution of the Jewish Question was caused, to certain degree, by the
influence of Bakst), and Rabbi A. Drabkin.637 In large part, it was these Jewish
experts who prepared the materials for the Commissions consideration.
The majority of the Palenskaya Commission expressed the conviction, that
the final goal of legislation concerning the Jews [should be] nothing other than
its abolition, that there is only one outcome and only one path: the path of
liberation and unification of the Jews with the whole population, under the
protection of the same laws.638 (Indeed, rarely in Russian legislation did such
complicated and contradictory laws pile up as the laws about Jews that
accumulated over the decades: 626 statutes by 1885! And they were still added
later and in the Senate they constantly researched and interpreted their
wording). And even if the Jews did not perform their duties as citizens in
equal measure with others, nevertheless it was impossible to deprive the Jew
of those fundamentals, on which his existence was based his equal rights as a
subject. Agreeing that several aspects of internal Jewish life require reforming
and that certain Jewish activities constituted exploitation of the surrounding
population, the majority of the Commission condemned the system of

636 EE [JE], T 12, p. 526.

637 Ibid. T 5, p. 862, T 3, p. 700.
638 Ibid*, T 1, p. 832-833.
repressive and exclusionary measures. The Commission set as the legislative
goal to equalize the rights of Jews, with those of all other subjects, although it
recommended the utmost caution and gradualness with this.639
Practically, however, the Commission only succeeded in carrying out a
partial mitigation of the restrictive laws. Its greatest efforts were directed of the
Temporary Regulations of 1882, particularly in regard to the renting of land by
Jews. The Commission made the argument as if in the defense of the
landowners, not the Jews: prohibiting Jews to rent manorial lands not only
impedes the development of agriculture, but also leads to a situation when
certain types of agriculture remain in complete idleness in the Western Krai to
the loss of the landowners as there is nobody to whom they could lease them.
However, the Minister of Interior Affairs, D.A. Tolstoy, agreed with the
minority of the Commission: the prohibition against new land-leasing
transactions would not be repealed.640
The Palenskaya Commission lasted for five years, until 1888, and in its
work the liberal majority always clashed with the conservative minority. From
the beginning, Count Tolstoy certainly had no intention to revise the laws to
increase the repressive measures, and the 5-year existence of the Palenskaya
Commission confirms this. At that moment His Majesty [also] did not wish to
influence the decisions of his government on the matter of the increase of
repressions against Jews. Ascending to the throne at such a dramatic moment,
Alexander III did not hasten either to replace liberal officials, nor to choose a
harsh political course: for long time he carefully examined things. In the
course of the entire reign of Alexander III, the question about a general revision
of the legislation about the Jews remained open.641 But by 1886-87, His
Majestys view already leaned toward hardening of the partial restrictions on the
Jews and so the work of the Commission did not produce any visible result.
One of the first motivations for stricter control or more constraint on the
Jews than during his fathers reign was the constant shortfall of Jewish
conscripts for military service; it was particularly noticeable when compared to
conscription of Christians. According to the Charter of 1874, which abolished
recruiting, compulsory military service was now laid on all citizens, without any
difference in social standing, but with the stipulation that those unfit for service
would be replaced: Christians with Christians, and Jews with Jews. In the case
of Jews there were difficulties in implementation of that rule as there were both
straightforward emigration of conscripts and their evasion which all benefited
from great confusion and negligence in the official records on Jewish
population, in the keeping of vital statistics, in the reliability of information
about the family situation and exact place of residence of conscripts. (The
tradition of all these uncertainties stretched back to the times of the Qahals (a
theocratic organizational structure that originated in ancient Israelite society),

639 Yu. Gessen*, T2, p. 227-228.

640 EE [JE], T 3, p. 85.
641 Ibid. T 1, p. 832-834.
and was consciously maintained for easing the tax burden.) In 1883 and 1884,
there were many occasions when Jewish recruits, contrary to the law, were
arrested simply upon suspicion that they might disappear.642 (This method was
first applied to Christian recruits, but sporadically). In some places they began
to demand photographs from the Jewish recruits a very unusual requirement
for that time. And in 1886 a highly constraining law was issued, about
several measures for providing for regular fulfillment of military conscription
by Jews, which established a 300-ruble fine from the relatives of each Jew
who evaded military call-up.643 From 1887 they stopped allowing Jews to
apply for the examination for officer rank [educated soldiers had privileges in
choosing military specialty in the course of service]. 644 (During the reign of
Alexander II, the Jews could serve in the officers ranks.) But officer positions
in military medicine always remained open to Jews.
Yet if we consider that in the same period up to 20 million other aliens of
the Empire were completely freed from compulsory military service, then
wouldnt it be better to free the Jews of it altogether, thus offsetting their other
constraints with such a privilege? Or was it the legacy of the idea of
Nicholas I continuing here to graft the Jews into Russian society through
military service? To occupy the idle?
At the same time, Jews on the whole flocked into institutions of learning.
From 1876 to 1883, the number of Jews in gymnasiums and gymnasium
preparatory schools almost doubled, and from 1878 to 1886 for an 8-year
period the number of Jewish students in the universities increased six times
and reached 14.5%.645 By the end of the reign of Alexander II they were
receiving alarming complaints from the regional authorities about this. Thus, in
1878 the Governor of the Minsk Guberniya reported, that being wealthier, the
Jews can bring up their children better than the Russians; that the material
condition of the Jewish pupils is better than that of Christians, and therefore in
order that the Jewish element does not overwhelm the remaining population, it
is necessary to introduce a quota system for the admission of Jews into
secondary schools.646 Next, after disturbances in several southern gymnasiums
in 1880, the Trustee of the Odessa School District publicly came out with a
similar idea. And in 1883 and 1885 two successive Novorossiysk (Odessa)
General-Governors stated that an over-filling of learning institutions with
Jews was taking place there, and it is either necessary to limit the number of
Jews in the gymnasiums and gymnasium preparatory schools to 15% of the
general number of pupils, or to a fairer norm, equal to the proportion of the
Jewish population to the whole.647 (By 1881, Jews made up 75% of the general

642 Ibid, T 3, p. 167.

643 Ibid. T 1, p. 836.
644 Ibid. T 3, p. 167.
645 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 230.
646 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 229.
647 EE [JE], T 13, p. 51; T 1, p. 834-835.
number of pupils in several gymnasiums of the Odessa District. 648) In 1886, a
report was made by the Governor of Kharkov Guberniya, complaining about
the influx of Jews to the common schools.649
In all these instances, the ministers did not deem it possible to adopt
general restrictive solutions, and only directed the reports for consideration to
the Palenskaya Commission, where they did not receive support.
From the 1870s students become primary participants in the revolutionary
excitement. After the assassination of Alexander II, the general intention to put
down the revolutionary movement could not avoid student revolutionary nests
(and the senior classes of the gymnasiums were already supplying them). Within
the government there arose the alarming connection that together with the
increase of Jews among the students, the participation of students in the
revolutionary movement noticeably increased. Among the higher institutions of
learning, the Medical-Surgical Academy (later the Military-Medical Academy)
was particularly revolutionized. Jews were very eager to enter it and the names
of Jewish students of this academy began already appearing in the court trials of
the 1870s.
And so the first special restrictive measure of 1882 restricted Jewish
admissions to the Military-Medical Academy to an upper limit of 5%.
In 1883, a similar order followed with respect to the Mining Institute; and
in 1884 a similar quota was established at the Institute of Communications. 650 In
1885, the admission of Jews to the Kharkov Technological Institute was limited
to 10%, and in 1886 their admission to the Kharkov Veterinary Institute was
completely discontinued, since the city of Kharkov was always a center of
political agitation, and the residence of Jews there in more or less significant
numbers is generally undesirable and even dangerous.651
Thus, they thought to weaken the crescendo of revolutionary waves.

648 Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 231.

649 EE [JE], T 1, p. 835.
650 Ibid. p. 834.
651 Ibid*, T 13, p. 51.
 Chapter 6. In the Russian Revolutionary Movement

In the Russia of the 6070s of the nineteenth century, when reforms moved
rapidly, there were no economic or social motives for a farreaching
revolutionary movement. Yet it was indeed under Alexander II, from the
beginning of his reforming work, that this movement was born, as the
prematurelyripened fruit of ideology: in 1861 there were student
demonstrations in Saint Petersburg; in 1862, violent fires of criminal origin in
Saint Petersburg as well, and the sanguinary proclamation of Young Russia 652
(Molodaia Rossiia); in 1866, Karakozovs653 gunshot, the prodromes of the
terrorist era, half a century in advance.
And it was also under Alexander II, when the restrictions on the rights of
the Jews were so relaxed, that Jewish names appeared among the
revolutionaries. Neither in the circles of Stankyevich654, Herzen655 and
Ogariov656 nor in that of Petrachevsky, there had been only one Jew. (We do not
speak here of Poland.) But at the student demonstrations of 1861 Mikhoels,
Outine657 and Guen will participate. And we shall find Outine in the circle of
Nechayev658.

652 Molodaia Rossiia: Revolutionary proclamation of the Russian Jacobins dated May 1862,
written by P. G. Zaychnevsky.
653 Dmitri Vladimirovich Karakozov (18401866) fired a shot at Alexander II on 4/16 April
1866: the first in a long series of attacks. Condemned to death and executed.
654 Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich (18131840): philosopher and poet, humanist. Founded
in 1831 the Stankevich circle where great intellectuals such as Bielinsky, Aksakov,
Granovsky, Katkov, etc. meet. Emigrated in 1837.
655 Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (18121870): writer, philosopher and Occidentalist Russian
revolutionary. Spent six years in exile. Emigrated in 1847 and founded the first antiwar
newspaper published abroad, Kolokol (The Bell). Author of Memoirs on his time, Past and
Thoughts.
656 Nikolai Platonovich Ogariov (18131877): poet, Russian revolutionary publicist. Friend
and companion in arms of Herzen. Emigrated in 1856. Participated in the foundation of
Land and Liberty.
657 Nikolai Isaakovich Outine (18411883): revolutionary, leading member of Earth and
Freedom. Condemned to death in absentia. Emigrated in 1863, returned to Russia in 1878.
658 Sergei Gennadyevich Nechayev (18471882): revolutionary and Russian conspirator,
author of the famous Catechism of the Revolutionary. Organised in 1869 the murder of the
student Ivanov, supposedly a traitor to the Cause (which inspired Dostoevskys The
Demons). Leaves abroad. Delivered by Switzerland to Russia, sentenced to twenty years of
imprisonment. Dies in prison.
 The participation of the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement must
get our attention; indeed, radical revolutionary action became a more and more
widespread form of activity among Jewish youth. The Jewish revolutionary
movement is a qualitatively important component of the Russian revolutionary
movement in general. As for the ratio of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries
over the years, it surprises us. Of course, if in the following pages we speak
mainly of Jews, this in no way implies that there was not a large number of
influential revolutionaries among the Russians: our focus is warranted by the
subject of our study.
In fact, until the early 70s, only a very small number of Jews had joined the
revolutionary movement, and in secondary roles at that. (In part, no doubt,
because there were still very few Jews among the students.) One learns, for
example, that Leon Deutsch at the age of ten was outraged about Karakozovs
gunshot because he felt patriotic. Similarly, few Jews adhered to the Russian
nihilism of the 60s that, nevertheless, by their rationalism, they assimilated
easily. Nihilism has played an even more beneficial role in Jewish student
youth than in Christian youth.659
However, as early as the early 70s, the circle of young Jews of the
rabbinical school in Vilnius began to play an important role. (Among them, V.
Yokhelson, whom we mention later, and the wellknown terrorist A.
Zundelevichboth brilliant pupils, destined to be excellent rabbis, A.
Liebermann, future editor of La Pravda of Vienna, and Anna Einstein, Maxim
Romm, Finkelstein.) This circle was influential because it was in close contact
with the smugglers660 and permitted clandestine literature, as well as illegal
immigrants themselves, to cross the border.661
It was in 1868, after high school, that Mark Natanson entered the Academy
of Medicine and Surgery (which would become the Academy of Military
Medicine). He will be an organiser and a leading figure in the revolutionary
movement. Soon, with the young student Olga Schleisner, his future wife
(whom Tikhomirov calls the second Sophia Perovskaya, although at the time
she was rather the first **), he laid the foundations of a system of socalled
pedagogical circles, that is to say of propaganda (preparatory, cultural and
revolutionary work with intellectual youth662) in several large cities. (These
circles were wrongly dubbed Tchaikovskyists, named after one of their less
influential members, N.V. Tchaikovsky.) Natanson distinguished himself very
quickly and resolutely from the circle of Nechayev (and he did not hesitate,

659 L. Deutsch, King evreiev v rousskom revolioutsionnom dvijenii (The role of the Jews in the
Russian revolutionary movement), vol. 1, 2nd ed., M.L., GIZ, 1925, pp. 2022.
660 People who succeed in passing, illegally through the borders, revolutionary writings banned
in Russia.
661 D. Schub, Evro vroussko revolyutsii (The Jews in the Russian Revolution). JW2; Hessen,
t. 2, p. 213.
662 O. V. Aptekman, Dvc doroguiie teni (Two Dear Shadows); Byloie: newspaper
Posviaschionnyi istorii osvoboditclnogo dvijeniia (Past: a review of the history of the
liberation movement), M. 1921, No. 16, p. 9.
subsequently, to present his views to the examining magistrate). In 1872 he
went to Zurich with Pierre Lavrov, the principal representative of the current of
pacific propaganda663, which rejected the rebellion; Natanson wanted to
establish a permanent revolutionary organ there. In the same year he was sent to
Shenkursk in close exile and, through the intercession of his fatherinlaw, the
father of Olga Schleiser, he was transferred to Voronezh, then Finland, and
finally released to Saint Petersburg. He found there nothing but discouragement,
dilapidation, inertia. He endeavoured to visit the disunited groups, to connect
them, to weld them, and thus founded the first Land and Freedom organisation
and spending hundreds of thousands of Rubles.
Among the principal organisers of Russian populism, Natanson is the most
eminent revolutionary. It was in his wake that the famous Leon Deutsch
appeared; As for the ironclad populist Alexander Mikhailov, he was a disciple of
Mark the Wise. Natanson knew many revolutionaries personally. Neither an
orator nor a writer, he was a born organiser, endowed with an astonishing
quality: he did not regard opinions and ideology, he did not enter into any
theoretical discussions with anyone, he was in accord with all tendencies (with
the exception of the extremist positions of Tkachev, Lenins predecessor),
placed each and everyone where they could be useful. In those years when
Bakunin supporters and Lavrov supporters were irreconcilable, Natanson
proposed to put an end to discussions about the music of the future and to
focus instead on the real needs of the cause. It was he who, in the summer of
1876, organised the sensational escape of Piotr Kropotkin * on the Barbarian,
that halfblood who would often be spoken of. In December of the same year, he
conceived and set up the first public meeting in front of the Cathedral of Our
Lady of Kazan, at the end of the Mass, on the day of Saint Nicholas: all the
revolutionaries gathered there and for the first time, the red flag of Land and
Liberty was displayed. Natanson was arrested in 1877, sentenced to three years
detention, then relegated to Yakutia and dismissed from revolutionary action
until 1890.664
There were a number of Jews in the circle of Tchaikovskyists in Saint
Petersburg as well as in its branches in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa. (In Kiev,
notably, P.B. Axelrod, whom we have already mentioned, the future Danish
publisher and diplomat Grigori Gurevitch, future teachers Semion Lourie and
Leiser Lwenthal, his brother Nahman Lwenthal, and the two Kaminer
sisters.) As for the first Nihilist circle of Leon Deutsch in Kiev, it was
constituted exclusively of young Jewish students 665. After the demonstration
in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, three Jews were tried, but not
Natanson himself. At the trial of the fifty666 which took place in the summer
of 1877 in Moscow, several Jews were charged for spreading propaganda
663 Piotr Lavrovich Lavrov (18231900): famous theorist of populism. Emigrated in 1870.
Published the magazine Vperiod (Forward).
664 L. Deutsch, pp. 97, 108, 164, 169174, 196.
665 Ibidem, pp. 20, 130, 139.
666 Held in March 1877, also said trial of Muscovites, of which sixteen women.
among factory workers. At the trial of the one hundred and ninetythree 667,
there were thirteen Jews accused. Among the early populists, we can also cite
Lossif Aptekman and Alexander Khotinsky, who were highly influential.668
Natansons idea was that revolutionaries should involve the people
(peasants) and be for them like lay spiritual guides. This march to the people,
which has become so famous since then, began in 1873 in the dolgushinian
circle (Dolgushin, Dmokhovsky, Gamov, etc.) where no Jews were counted.
Later, the Jews also went to the people. (The opposite also happened: in
Odessa, P. Axelrod tried to attract Jeliabov669 in a secret revolutionary
organisation, but he refused: at the time, he was still a Kulturtrasser.) In the
mid70s, there were only about twenty of these populists, all or almost all
Lavrov and not Bakunin. (Only the most extreme were listening to calls for the
insurrection of Bakunin, such as Deutsch, who, with the help of Stefanovitch,
had raised the Tchiguirine revolt670 by having pushed the peasants into
thinking that the tsar, surrounded by the enemy, had the people saying: turn back
all these authorities, seize the land, and establish a regime of freedom!)
It is interesting to note that almost no Jewish revolutionary launched into
the revolution because of poverty, but most of them came from wealthy
families. (In the three volumes of the Russian Jewish Encyclopdia there is no
shortage of examples.) Only Paul Axelrod came from a very poor family, and, as
we have already said, he had been sent by the Kahal to an institution solely to
supplement the established quota. (From there, very naturally, he entered the
gymnasium of Mogilev, then the high school of Nejine.) Came from wealthy
merchant environments: Natanson, Deutsch, Aptekman (whose family had
many Talmudists, doctors of the lawincluding all his uncles. Khotinsky,
Gurevitch, Semion Lourie (whose family, even in this milieu, was considered
aristocratic, little Simon was also destined to be a rabbi, but under the
influence of the Enlightenment, his father, Gerts Lourie, had entrusted his son to
college to become a professor); the first Italian Marxist, Anne Rosenstein
(surrounded from childhood by governesses speaking several languages), the
tragic figures of Moses Rabinovitch and Betty Kaminskaya, Felicie Cheftel,
Joseph Guetsov, member of the Black Repartition, among many others. And
then again Khrystyna (Khasia) Grinberg, of a wealthy traditionalist merchant
family, who in 1880 joined the Will of the People: her dwelling housed
clandestine meetings, she was an accomplice in the attacks on Alexander II, and
even became in 1882 the owner of a clandestine dynamite factorythen was

667 Held from October 1877 to February 1878: the most important political trial of Russia
before 1917 (there were four thousand arrests among the populists of the march to the
people).
668 Ibidem, pp. 33, 8688, 185.
669 Andrei Ivanovich Jeliabov (18511881): one of the founders of The Will of the People.
Named the Russian Robespierre. Organiser of the attacks against Alexander II. Executed
in April 1881.
670 In 187677. A group of revolutionary populists tried to raise a peasant insurrection in the
district of Tchiguirine in Ukraine.
condemned to deportation.671 Neither did Fanny Moreinis come from a poor
family; she also participated in the preparations of attacks against the Emperor
Alexander II, and spent two years in the prison of Kara. 672 Some came from
families of rabbis, such as the future doctor of philosophy Lioubov Axelrod or
Ida Axelrod. There were also families of the petty bourgeoisie, but wealthy
enough to put their children through college, such as Aizik Aronchik (after
college, he entered the School of Engineers of Saint Petersburg, which he soon
abandoned to embark in revolutionary activities), Alexander Bibergal, Vladimir
Bogoraz, Lazarus Goldenberg, the Lwenthal brothers. Often, mention is made
in the biographies of the aforementioned, of the Academy of Military Medicine,
notably in those of Natanson, Bibergal, Isaac Pavlovsky (future
counterrevolutionary673), M. Rabinovitch, A. Khotinsky, Solomon Chudnovsky,
Solomon Aronson (who happened to be involved in these circles), among
others.674
Therefore it was not material need that drove them, but the strength of their
convictions.
It is not without interest to note that in these Jewish families the adhesion
of young people to the revolution has rarelyor not at allprovoked a break
between fathers and sons, between parents and their children. The fathers
did not go after the sons very much, as was then the case in Christian families.
(Although Gesya Gelfman had to leave her family, a traditional Old Alliance
family, in secret.) The fathers were often very far from opposing their
children. Thus Guerz Lourie, as well as Isaac Kaminer, a doctor from Kiev: the
whole family participated in the revolutionary movement of the 70s, and
himself, as a sympathiser, rendered great service to the revolutionaries;
three of them became the husbands of his daughters. (In the 1990s, he joined the
Zionist movement and became the friend of AchadHaam.675 676)
Neither can we attribute antiRussian motivations to these early Jewish
revolutionaries, as some do in Russia today. In no way!
It all began with the same nihilism of the 60s. Having initiated itself to
Russian education and to goy culture, having been imbued with Russian
literature, Jewish youth was quick to join the most progressive movement of
the time, nihilism, and with an ease all the greater as it broke with the
prescriptions of the past. Even the most fanatical of the students of a yeshiva,
immersed in the study of the Talmud, after two or three minutes of

671 RJE, t. 1, M. 1994, p. 377.

672 RJE, t. 2, p. 309.
673 Isaac Yakovlevich Pavlovsky, known as I. Yakovlev: journalist, one of the accused of the
trial of the one hundred and ninetythree. Emigre, protected by Turgenev, became the
correspondent in Paris of the New Times.
674 Deutsch, pp. 7779, 85, 89112, 140, 21X: V. I. Iohelsohn, Daliokoie prochloie (A distant
Past); Byloie, 1918, No. 13, pp. 5455.
675 Deutsch, pp. 18, 149, 151, 154.
676 AhadHaam (ie One of his people), says Asher Finzberg: Yiddish writer very involved in
the Zionist movement.
conversation with a nihilist, broke with the patriarchal mode of thought. He
[the Jew, even pious] had only barely grazed the surface of goy culture, he had
only carried out a breach in his vision of the traditional world, but already he
was able to go far, very far, to the extremes. These young men were suddenly
gripped by the great universal ideals, dreaming of seeing all men become
brothers and all enjoying the same prosperity. The task was sublime: to liberate
mankind from misery and slavery!677
And there played the role of Russian literature. Pavel Axelrod, in high
school, had as his teachers Turgenev, Bielinsky, Dobrolyubov (and later
Lassalle678 who would make him turn to the revolution). Aptekman was fond of
Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pissarev (and also Bukle). Lazare Goldenberg,
too, had read and reread Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Pissarev, Nekrasov
and Rudin679, who died on the barricades, was his hero. Solomon Tchudnovsky,
a great admirer of Pissarev, wept when he died. The nihilism of Semion Lourie
was born of Russian literature, he had fed on it. This was the case for a very
large numberthe list would be too long.
But today, a century later, there are few who remember the atmosphere of
those years. No serious political action was taking place in the street of the
Jews, as it was then called, while, in the Street of the Russians, populism
was rising. It was quite simple: it was enough to sink, and merge into the
movement of Russian liberation680! Now this fusion was more easily
facilitated, accelerated by Russian literature and the writings of radical
publicists.
By turning to the Russian world, these young people turned away from the
Jewish world. Many of them conceived hostility and disdain to the Judaism of
their fathers, just like towards a parasitic anomaly. 681 In the 70s there were
small groups of radical Jewish youths who, in the name of the ideals of
populism, moved more and more away from their people, began to assimilate
vigorously and to appropriate the Russian national spirit. 682 Until the mid70s,
the socialist Jews did not consider it necessary to do political work with their
fellow men, because, they thought, the Jews have never possessed land and thus
cannot assimilate socialist ideas. The Jews never had peasants of their own.
None of the Jewish revolutionaries of the 70s could conceive of the idea of
acting for ones own nation alone. It was clear that one only acted in the
677 Ibidem, pp. 1718.
678 Ferdinand Lassalle (18251864): philosopher, economist, jurist and famous German
socialist.
679 Rudin, the hero of Turgenevs novel, Rudin (1856), whom the author put to death on the
barricades in Paris in 1848.
680 K. Leites, Pamiati M. A. Krolia (The memory of M. A. Krol), JW2, p. 410.
681 B. Frumkin. Iz istorii revolioutsionnogo dvijeniia sredi evreiev v 1870x godakh (Pages of
the history of the revolutionary movement among the Jews in the 70s) Sb. Soblazn
Sotsializma: Revolutionsiia v Rossii i evrei (Rec. The Temptation of Socialism Revolution
in Russia and the Jews), composed by A. Serebrennikov, Paris, YMCA Press; Rousskii Put
(The Russian Way), 1995. p. 49.
682 JE, L 3, p. 336.
dominant language and only for the Russian peasants. For us there were no
Jewish workers. We looked at them with the eyes of russifiers: the Jew must
assimilate completely with the native population; even artisans were regarded
as potential exploiters, since they had apprentices and employees. In fact,
Russian workers and craftsmen were not accorded any importance as an
autonomous class: they existed only as future socialists who would facilitate
work in the peasant world.683
Assimilation once accepted, these young people, by their situation,
naturally tended towards radicalism, having lost on this new soil the solid
conservative roots of their former environment.
We were preparing to go to the people and, of course, to the Russian
people. We deny the Jewish religion, like any other religion; we considered our
jargon an artificial language, and Hebrew a dead language We were sincere
assimilators and we saw in the Russian education and culture salvation for the
Jews Why then did we seek to act among the Russian people, not the Jewish
people? It comes from the fact that we had become strangers to the spiritual
culture of the Jews of Russia and that we rejected their thinkers who belonged
to a traditionalist bourgeoisie from the ranks of which we had left
ourselves We thought that, when the Russian people would be freed from the
despotism and yoke of the ruling classes, the economic and political freedom of
all the peoples of Russia, including the Jewish people, would arise. And it must
be admitted that Russian literature has also somewhat inculcated the idea that
the Jewish people were not a people but a parasitic class.684
Also came into play the feeling of debt owed to the people of Great Russia,
as well as the faith of the populist rebels in the imminence of a popular
insurrection.685 In the 70s, the Jewish intellectual youth went to the people
in the hope of launching, with its feeble hands, the peasant revolution in
Russia.686 As Aptekman writes, Natanson, like the hero of the Mtsyri of
Lermontov,
Knew the hold of only one thought,
lived only one, but burning passion.
This thought was the happiness of the people; this passion, the struggle for
liberation.687 Aptekman himself, as depicted by Deutsch, was emaciated, of
small stature, pale complexion, with very pronounced national features;
having become a village nurse, he announced socialism to the peasants through
the Gospel.688

683 Deutsch, pp. 56, 6768.

684 Iohelson, Byloie, 1918, No. 13, pp. 5657.
685 Ibidem, pp. 61, 66.
686 G. J. Aronson, V. borbe za grajdanskiie i nalsionalnyie prava: obschcstvcnnyie tetcheniia v
rousskom evreistve (In the struggle for national civil rights: the social currents among the
Jews of Russia), UR1, p. 210.
687 Aptekman. Byloie, 1921, No. 16, pp. 1112.
688 Deutsch, pp. 183185
 It was a little under the influence of their predecessors, the members of the
Dolgouchin circle, whom inscribed on the branches of the crucifix: In the
name of Christ, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and almost all preached the
Gospel, that the first Jewish populists turned to Christianity, which they used as
a support point and as an instrument. Aptekman writes about himself: I have
converted to Christianity by a movement from the heart and love for Christ. 689
(Not to be confused with the motives of Tan Bogoraz, who in the 80s had
converted to Christianity to escape the vexations of his Jewish origin. 690 Nor
with the feint of Deutsch who went to preach the molokanes 691 by presenting
himself as a good orthodox.) But, adds Aptekman, in order to give oneself
to the people, there is no need to repent: with regard to the Russian people, I
had no trace of repentance. Moreover, where could it have come from? Is it not
rather for me, the descendant of an oppressed nation, to demand the settlement
of this dealing, instead of paying the repayment of some, I am not sure which,
fantastic loan? Nor have I observed this feeling of repentance among my
comrades of the nobility who were walking with me on the same path.692
Let us note in this connection that the idea of a rapprochement between the
desired socialism and historical Christianity was not unconnected with many
Russian revolutionaries at the time, and as justification for their action, and as a
convenient tactical procedure. V. V. Flerovsky693 wrote: I always had in mind
the comparison between this youth who was preparing for action and the first
Christians. And, immediately after, the next step: By constantly turning this
idea into my head, I have come to the conviction that we will reach our goal
only by one meansby creating a new religion It is necessary to teach the
people to devote all their forces to oneself exclusively I wanted to create the
religion of brotherhood and the young disciples of Flerovsky tried to lead
the experiment by wondering how a religion that would have neither God nor
saints would be received by the people.
His disciple Gamov, from the circle of Dolgouchine, wrote even more
crudely: We must invent a religion that would be against the tsar and the
government We must write a catechism and prayers in this spirit.694
The revolutionary action of the Jews in Russia is also explained in another
way. We find it exposed and then refuted by A. Srebrennikov: There is a view
that if, through the reforms of the years 18601863, the Pale of Settlement had
been abolished, our whole history would have unfolded otherwise If
689 O. V. Aptekman, FlerovskiBervi i kroujok Dolgouchina (BerviFlerovsky and the circle of
Dolgouchine), Byloie, 1922, No. 18, p. 63.
690 JE, t. 4, p. 714.
691 Molokanes or milk drinkers (they consume milk during Lent) are a Russian sect that goes
back to the eighteenth century. They were persecuted, exiled in 1800 north of the Sea of
Azov, and some immigrated to the United States.
692 Aptekman, Byloie, 1922, No. 18, p. 63.
693 Vassili Vasilievich BerviFlerovsky (18291918): Russian publicist, sociologist, economist.
Participated in the populism of the 60s. In exile from 1862 to 1887. Wrote the Notes of a
Revolutionary Utopian.
694 Ibidem*.
Alexander II had abolished the Pale of Settlement, there would have been
neither the Bund695 nor Trotskyism! Then he mentioned the internationalist and
socialist ideas that flowed from the West, and wrote: If the suppression of the
Pale of Settlement had been of capital importance to them, all their struggle
would have stretched towards it. Now they were occupied with everything else:
they dreamed of overthrowing tsarism!696
And, one after the other, driven by the same passion, they abandoned their
studies (notably the Academy of Military Medicine) to go to the people. Every
diploma was marked with the seal of infamy as a means of exploitation of the
people. They renounced any career, and some broke with their families. For
them, every day not put to good use [constitutes] an irreparable loss, criminal
for the realisation of the wellbeing and happiness of the disinherited
masses.697
But in order to go to the people, it was necessary to make oneself
simple, both internally, for oneself, and practically, to inspire confidence to
the masses of the people, one had to infiltrate it under the guise of a workman
or a moujik.698 However, writes Deutsch, how can you go to the people, be
heard and be believed, when you are betrayed by your language, your
appearance and your manners? And still, to seduce the listeners, you must throw
jokes and good words in popular language! And we must also be skilful in the
work of the fields, so painful to townspeople. For this reason, Khotinsky
worked on the farm with his brother, and worked there as a ploughman. The
Lwenthal brothers learned shoemaking and carpentry. Betty Kamenskaya
entered as a worker in a spinning mill to a very hard position. Many became
caregivers. (Deutsch writes that, on the whole, other activities were better suited
to these revolutionary Jews: work within factions, conspiracy, communications,
typography, bordercrossing.)699
The march to the people began with short visits, stays of a few months
a fluid march. At first, they relied only on the work of agitation. It was
imagined that it would suffice to convince the peasants to open their eyes to the
regime in power and the exploitation of the masses, and to promise that the land
and the instruments of production would become the property of all.
In fact, this whole march to the people of the populists ended in failure.
And not only because of some inadvertent gunshot directed against the Tsar
(Solovyov, 1879), which obliged them all to flee the country and to hide very far
from the cities. But above all because the peasants, perfectly deaf to their
preaching, were even sometimes ready to hand them over to the authorities. The
populists, the Russians (hardly more fortunate) like the Jews, lost the faith in

695 The Bund (in Yiddish: the Union): the General Union of Jewish Workers of Lithuania,
Poland and Russia, founded in Vilnius in 1897, related to the SD party in 18981903; then
again in 19061918 close to the Mensheviks. Dissolved in 1921.
696 Obschaia gazela (General Gazette), No. 35, 31 August6 Sept. 1995, p. 11.
697 Deutsch, pp. 106, 205206.
698 Iohelson, Byloie, 1918, No. 13, p. 74.
699 Deutsch, pp. 3437, 183.
a spontaneous revolutionary will and in the socialist instincts of the peasantry,
and transformed into impenitent pessimists.700
Clandestine action, however, worked better. Three residents of Minsk,
Lossif Guetsov, Saul Levkov, and Saul Grinfest, succeeded in setting up a
clandestine press in their city that would serve the country as a whole. It
survived until 1881. It was there that was printed in gold letters the leaflet on
the execution of Alexander II. It printed the newspaper The Black
Repartition701, and then the proclamations of The Will of the People. Deutsche
referred to them as peaceful propagandists. Apparently, the term peaceful
embraced everything that was not bombingsmuggling, illegal border
crossing, and even the call to avoid paying taxes (appeal to the peasants of
Lazare Goldenberg).
Many of these Jewish revolutionaries were heavily condemned (heavily,
even by the measures of our time). Some benefited from a reduction of their
punishmentlike Semion Lourie, thanks to his father who obtained for him a
less severe regime in prison. There was also public opinion, which leaned
towards indulgence. Aptekman tells us that in 1881after the assassination of
Alexander IIthey lived relatively freely in the prison of Krasnoyarsk where
the director of the prison, a real wild beast, was suddenly tamed and gave us all
kinds of permissions to contact the deportees and our friends. Then we were
received in transit prisons not as detainees, but as noble captives; the prison
director came in, accompanied by soldiers carrying trays with tea, biscuits, jam
for everyone, and, as a bonus, a small glass of vodka. Was it not idyllic? We
were touched.702
The biographies of these early populists reveal a certain exaltation, a
certain lack of mental equilibrium. Leo Deutsch testifies: Leon Zlatopolsky, a
terrorist, was not a mentally balanced person. Aptekman himself, in his cell,
after his arrest, was not far from madness, as his nerves were shaken. Betty
Kamenskaya, from the second month of detention lost her mind; she
was transferred to the hospital, then her father, a merchant, took her back on
bail. Having read in the indictment that she would not be brought before the
court, she wanted to tell the prosecutor that she was in good health and could
appear, but soon after, she swallowed poison and died.703 Moses Rabinovitch, in
his cell, had hallucinations his nerves were exhausted; he resolved to feign
repentance, to name those whom the instruction was surely already acquainted
with, in order to be liberated. He drew up a declaration promising to say
everything he knew and even, upon his release from prison, to seek and transmit
information. The result was that he confessed everything without being released
and that he was sent to the province of Irkutsk where he went mad and died
barely over the age of 20. Examples of this kind are not lacking. Leiser
700 Ibidem, pp. 194 et suiv. ; Iohelson, Byloie, 1918, No. 13, p. 69.
701 The Black Repartition, a clandestine newspaper bearing the same name as the organisation,
which knew five issues in 18801881 MinskGeneva.
702 Aptekman, Byloie. 1922, No. 18. pp. 73, 75.
703 Deutsch, pp. 38, 41, 94, 189.
Tsukerman, immigrated to New York, and put an end to his life. Nahman
Lwenthal, after having immigrated to Berlin, was sent into the dizzying
downward spiral of a nervous breakdown, to which was added an unhappy
love; he swallowed sulphuric acid and threw himself into the riverat the
age of about 19.704 These young individuals had thrown themselves away by
overestimating their strength and the resistance of their nerves.
And even Grigori Goldenberg, who, in cold blood, had defeated the
governor of Kharkov and asked his comrades, as a supreme honor, to kill by his
own hand the Tsar (but his comrades, fearing popular anger, had apparently
dismissed him as a Jew; apparently, this argument often prompted populists to
designate most often Russians, to perpetrate attacks): after being arrested while
carrying a charge of dynamite, he was seized by unbearable anguish in his cell
of the Troubetskoy bastion, his spirit was broken, he made a full confession that
affected the whole movement, petitioned that Aaron Zundelevich come share
his cell (who showed more indulgence than others towards his actions). When it
was refused, he committed suicide.705
Others, who were not directly involved, suffered, such as Moses Edelstein,
who was by no means an ideologist, who had slipped, for a price, clandestine
literature; he suffered much in prison, prayed to Yahweh for himself and his
family: he repented during the judgment: I did not imagine that there could be
such bad books. Or S. Aronson who, after the trial of the one hundred and
ninetythree, disappeared completely from the revolutionary scene.706
Another point is worthy of noting; it was the facility with which many of
them left that Russia which they had long ago intended to save. In fact, in the
70s emigration was regarded as desertion in revolutionary circles: even if the
police seek you, go underground, but do not run away! 707Tan Bogoraz left to
live twenty years in New York.Lazar GoldenbergGetroitman also left to
New York in 1885, where he gave classes on the history of the revolutionary
movement in Russia; he returned to Russia in 1906, after the amnesty, to leave
again rather quickly to Britain, where he remained until his death. 708In
London, one of the Vayner brothers became the owner of a furniture workshop
and Mr. Aronson and Mr. Romm became Clinical Doctors in New York.After
a few years in Switzerland, I. Guetsov went to live in America, having radically
broken with the Socialist movement.Leiser Lwenthal, emigrated to
Switzerland, completed his medical studies in Geneva, became the assistant of a
great physiologist before obtaining a chair of histology in Lausanne.Semion
Lourie also finished his studies in a faculty of medicine in Italy, but died shortly

704 Ibidem, pp. 7879, 156157.

705 Grigori Goldenberg v Petropavolvskoi kreposti (Grigori Goldenberg in prison SaintPierre
elSaintPaul); Krasnyi arkhiv: istorilcheskii journal Tsentrarkhiva RSFSR (The Red
Archives: Historical Review of the FSSR Archives Center), M., 19221941, t. 10; 1925, pp.
328331.
706 Deutsch*, pp. 8586.
707 Ibidem, p.132.
708 RJE, t. 1. p. 344.
after.Liubov Axelrod (the Orthodox709) remained for a long time in
immigration, where he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the
University of Berlin (later he inculcated dialectical materialism to students of
Soviet graduate schools.) A. Khotinsky also entered the Faculty of Medicine of
Bern (but died the following year from a galloping consumption). Grigory
Gurayev made a fine career in Denmark; he returned to Russia as the countrys
ambassador in Kiev, where he stayed until 1918.710
All this also shows how many talented men there were among these
revolutionaries. Men such as these, endowed with such lively intelligence, when
they found themselves in Siberia, far from wasting or losing their reason, they
opened their eyes to the tribes which surrounded them, studied their languages
and their customs, and wrote ethnographic studies about them: Leon Sternberg
on the Ghiliaks,711 TanBogoraz on the Tchouktches,712 Vladimir Yokhelson on
the Yukaghirs,713 and Naoum Guekker on the physical type of the lakuts. 714715
Some studies on the Buryats716 are due to Moses Krohl.
Some of these Jewish revolutionaries willingly joined the socialist
movement in the West. Thus V. Yokhelson and A. Zundelevich, during the
Reichstag elections in Germany, campaigned on the side of the Social
Democrats. Zundelevich was even arrested for having used fraudulent methods.
Anne Rosenstein, in France, was convicted for organising a street demonstration
in defiance of the regulations governing traffic on the street; Turgenev
intervened for her and she was expelled to Italy where she was twice
condemned for anarchist agitation (she later married F. Turati, 717 converted him
to socialism and became herself the first Marxist of Italy). Abram ValtLessine,
a native of Minsk, published articles for seventeen years in New York in the
socialist organ of America Vorwarts and exerted a great influence on the
formation of the American labour movement.718 (That road was going to be
taken by many others of our Socialists)
It sometimes happened that revolutionary emigrants were disappointed by
the revolution. Thus Moses Veller, having distanced himself from the

709 Liubov Issaakovna Axelrod: philosopher, writer, member of the Menshevik party. His pen
name is the Orthodox (in the nonconfessional sense of the word).
710 Deutsch, pp. 6162, 198201, 203216.
711 The Ghiliaks are a tribe of the north of the island of Sakhalin and the valley of the lower
Amur.
712 The Tchouktches, a tribe of eastern Siberia occupying a territory ranging from the Sea of
Behring to the Kolyma. Nomads and sedentary. Opposed the Russian conquest.
713 The Yukaghirs are a tribe of the northeast of Siberia, very small in number.
714 JE, t. 6, p. 284.
715 The lakuts are a people of northeastern Siberia, occupying both banks of the Lena,
extending east to the Kolyma River, north to the Arctic Ocean, south to the Yablovoi
mountains.
716 The Buryats, people of Siberia around Lake Baikal, partly repressed towards Mongolia.
717 Filippo Turati (18571932): one of the founders of the Italian Socialist Party. Emigrated in
1926.
718 RJE, t. 2, p. 166; t. l, p. 205.
movement, succeeded, thanks to Turgenevs intervention with LorisMelikov, to
return to Russia. More extravagant was the journey of Isaac Pavlovsky: living in
Paris, as illustrious revolutionary, he had connections with Turgenev, who
made him know Emile Zola and Alphonse Daudet; he wrote a novel about the
Russian nihilists that Turgenev published in the Vestnik Evropy719 (The
Messenger of Europe), and then he became the correspondent in Paris of
Novoye Vremia720 the New Times under the pseudonym of I. Iakovlevand
even, as Deutsch writes, he portrayed himself as antiSemite, sent a petition in
high places, was pardoned and returned to Russia.721
That said, the majority of the Jewish revolutionaries blended in, just like
the Russians, and their track was lost. With the exception of two or three
prominent figures all my other compatriots were minor players, writes
Deutsch.722 A Soviet collection, published the day after the revolution under the
title of Historical and Revolutionary Collection,723 quotes many names of
humble soldiers unknown to the revolution. We find there dozens, even
hundreds of Jewish names. Who remembers them now? However, all have
taken action, all have brought their contribution, all have shaken more or less
strongly the edifice of the State.
Let us add: this very first contingent of Jewish revolutionaries did not fully
join the ranks of the Russian revolution, all did not deny their Judaism. A.
Liebermann, a great connoisseur of the Talmud, a little older than his populist
fellow students, proposed in 1875 to carry out a specific campaign in favour of
socialism among the Jewish population. With the help of G. Gurevich, he
published a socialist magazine in Yiddish called Emes (Pravda = Truth) in
Vienna in 1877. Shortly before, in the 70s, A. Zundelevich undertook a
publication in the Hebrew language, also entitled Truth. (L. Shapiro
hypothesises that this publication was the distant ancestor of Trotskys The
Pravda.724 The tradition of this appellation was durable.) Some, like Valt
Lessine, insisted on the convergence of internationalism with Judaic
nationalism. In his improvised conferences and sermons, the prophet Isaiah
and Karl Marx figured as authorities of equal importance. 725 In Geneva was
founded the Jewish Free Typography,726 intended to print leaflets addressed to
the Jewish workingclass population.

719 The Messenger of Europe: 1) a journal founded by Karamzin and published from 1802 to
1830; 2) a monthly magazine with a liberal orientation, which appeared from 1866 to 1918
in Saint Petersburg.
720 The New Times: ultraconservative Petersburg daily founded by the publicist Suvorin.
Which appeared from 1868 to 1917.
721 Deutsch, pp. 8485; Lohelsohn. Byloe, 1918, no. 13, pp. 5375; L. Goumtch. Pervyie
evreiskiie rabotchiie kroujki (The first Jewish workers circles), Byloie, 1907, n. 6/18, p. 68.
722 Deutsch, p. 231.
723 RHC, t. 1, 2.
724 Leonard Schapiro, The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, The
Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 40, London, Athlone Press, 196162, p. 157.
725 JW.2*, p. 392.
726 JE, t. 13, p. 644.
 Specifically Jewish circles were formed in some cities. A Statute for the
Organisation of a SocialRevolutionary Union of the Jews of Russia,
formulated at the beginning of 1876, showed the need for propaganda in the
Hebrew language and even to organise between Jews of the western region a
network of socialrevolutionary sections, federated with each other and with
other sections of the same type found abroad. The Socialists of the whole
world formed a single brotherhood, and this organisation was to be called the
Jewish Section of the Russian SocialRevolutionary Party.727
Hessen comments: the action of this Union among the Jewish masses has
not met with sufficient sympathies, and that is why these Jewish socialists, in
their majority, lent a hand to the common cause, that is to say, to the Russian
cause.728 In fact, circles were created in Vilnius, Grodno, Minsk, Dvinsk,
Odessa, but also, for example, in Elts, Saratov, RostovonDon.
In the very detailed founding act of this SocialRevolutionary Union of all
Jews in Russia, one can read surprising ideas, statements such as: Nothing
ordinary has the right to exist if it has no rational justification729 (!)
By the end of the 70s, the Russian revolutionary movement was already
sliding towards terrorism. The appeal to the revolt of Bakunin had definitely
prevailed over the concern for instruction of the masses of Lavrov. Beginning in
1879, the idea of populist presence among the peasants had no effectthe idea
that dominated in The Will of the Peoplegained the upper hand over the
rejection of terror by The Black Repartition. Terror, nothing but terror!!much
more: a systematic terror! (That the people did not have a voice in the matter,
that the ranks of the intelligentsia were so sparse, did not disturb them.)
Terrorist actsincluding against the Tsar in person!thus succeeded one
another.
According to Leo Deutschs assessment, only ten to twelve Jews took part
in this growing terror, beginning with Aron Gobst (executed), Solomon
Wittenberg (prepared an attack on Alexander II in 1878, executed in 1879),
Aizik Aronchik (was involved in the explosion of the imperial train, condemned
to a penal colony for life) and Gregory Goldenberg, already named. Like
Goldenberg, A. Zundelevichbrilliant organiser of terror, but who was not
given the time to participate in the assassination of the Tsarwas arrested very
early. There was also another quite active terrorist: Mlodetsky. As for Rosa
Grossman, Krystyna Grinberg and the brothers Leo and Saveli Zlatopolsky, they
played a secondary role. (In fact, Saveli, as of March 1st, 1881730, was a member
of the Executive Committee); As for Gesya Gelfman, she was part of the basic
group of the actors of March 1st.731

727 Hessen, t. 2, pp. 213214.

728 Ibidem, p. 214.
729 RHC, 1.1, p. 45.
730 March 1st, 1881: day of the assassination of Alexander II.
731 Deutsch, pp. 3839, Protses dvadtsati narodovoltsev v 1882 g. (The trial of the members of
The Will of the People in 1882), Byloie, 1906, no. 1, pp. 227234.
 Then it was the 80s that saw the decline and dissolution of populism.
Government power took over; belonging to a revolutionary organisation cost a
firm eight to ten years of imprisonment. But if the revolutionary movement was
caught by inertia, its members continued to exist. One can quote here Sofia
Ginzburg: she did not engage in revolutionary action until 1877; she tried to
restore the Will of the People, which had been decimated by arrests; she
prepared, just after the Ulyanov group732, an attack on Alexander III.733 Soand
so was forgotten in deportation, another was coming back from it, a third was
only leaving for itbut they continued the battle.
Thusly was a famous deflagration described by the memorialists: the
rebellion in the prison of Yakutsk in 1889. An important contingent of political
prisoners had been told that they were going to be transferred to Verkhoyansk
and, from there, even further, to SrednieKolymsk, which they wanted to avoid
at all costs. The majority of the group were Jewish inmates. In addition, they
were informed that the amount of baggage allowed was reduced: instead of five
poods734 of books, clothes, linen, five poods also of bread and flour, two poods
of meat, plus oil, sugar and tea (the whole, of course, loaded on horses or
reindeer), a reduction of five poods in all. The deportees decided to resist. In
fact, it had already been six months that they had been walking freely in the city
of Yakutsk, and some had obtained weapons from the inhabitants. While
youre at it, might as well perish like this, and may the people discover all the
abomination of the Russian governmentperishing so that the spirit of combat
is revived among the living! When they were picked up to be taken to the
police station, they first opened fire on the officers, and the soldiers answered
with a salvo. Condemned to death, together with N. Zotov, were those who fired
the first shots at the vicegovernor: L. KoganBernstein and A. Gausman.
Condemned to forced labour in perpetuity were: the memorialist himself, O.
Minor, the celebrated M. Gotz735, and also A. Gurevitch and M. Orlov, Mr.
Bramson, Mr. Braguinsky, Mr. Fundaminsky, Mr. Ufland, S. Ratine, O.
Estrovitch, Sofia Gurevitch, Vera Gotz, Pauline Perly, A. Bolotina, N. Kogan
Bernstein. The Jewish Encyclopdia informs us that for this mutiny twentysix
Jews and six Russians were tried.736
That same year, 1889, Mark Natanson returned from exile and undertook to
forge, in place of the old dismantled populist organisations, a new organisation
called The Right of the People (Narodnoie Pravo). Natanson had already
witnessed the emergence of Marxism in Russia, imported from Europe, and its
competition with populism. He made every effort to save the revolutionary

732 The Ulyanov group, named after Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenins elder brother. Faction
of the Will of the People. Alexander Ulyanov prepared an attack on Alexander III in 1887.
He was condemned to death and executed.
733 RJE, t. 1, p. 314.
734 One pood is equivalent to 16.38 kilos.
735 Mikhail Rafaelovich Gotz (18661906): member of the S.R. party. Emigrated in 1900.
736 O. S. Minor, lakutskaia drama 22 marta 1889 goda (The drama of Yakutia of 22 March
1889), Byloie, 1906, no. 9, pp. 138141, 144; JE, t. 5, p. 599.
movement from decadence and to maintain ties with the Liberals (the best
liberals are also semisocialists). Not more than before did he look at nuances
of convictions: what mattered to him was that all should unite to overthrow the
autocracy, and when Russia was democratic, then it would be figured out. But
the organisation he set up this time proved to be amorphous, apathetic and
ephemeral. Besides, respecting the rules of the conspiracy was no longer
necessary. As Isaac Gurvitch very eloquently pointed out, because of the
absence of conspiracy, a mass of people fall into the clutches of the police, but
the revolutionaries are now so numerous that these losses do not counttrees
are knocked down, and chips go flying!737
The fracture that had occurred in the Jewish consciousness after 1881
1882 could not but be reflected somewhat in the consciousness of Jewish
revolutionaries in Russia. These young men had begun by drifting away from
Judaism, and many had returned to it. They had left the street of the Jews and
then returned to their people: Our entire historical destiny is linked to the
Jewish ghetto, it is from it that our national essence is forged. 738 Until the
pogroms of 18811882, absolutely none of us revolutionaries thought for a
moment that we should publicly explain the participation of the Jews in the
revolutionary movement. But then came the pogroms, which caused among
the majority of our countrymen an explosion of indignation. And now it was
not only the cultivated Jews, but some Jewish revolutionaries who had no
affinity with their nation, who suddenly felt obliged to devote their strength and
talents to their unjustly persecuted brothers.739 The pogroms have awakened
sleeping feelings, they have made young people more susceptible to the
sufferings of their people, and the people more receptive to revolutionary ideas.
Let this serve as a basis for an autonomous action of the Jewish mass: We are
obstinately pursuing our goal: the destruction of the current political regime.740
But behold, the unexpected support to the antiJewish pogroms brought by
the leaflets of The Will of the People! Leo Deutsch expresses his perplexity in a
letter to Axelrod, who also wonders: The Jewish question is now, in practice,
really insoluble for a revolutionary. What would one do, for example, in Balta,
where the Jews are being attacked? To defend them is tantamount to arousing
hatred against the revolutionaries who not only killed the Tsar, but also support
the Jews Reconciliation propaganda is now extremely difficult for the
party.741
This perplexity, P. L. Lavrov himself, the venerated chief, expresses it in his
turn: I recognise that the Jewish question is extremely complex, and for the
party, which intends to draw itself closer to the people and raise it against the
government, it is difficult in the highest degree because of the passionate
737 Gounitch, Byloie. 1907, no. 6/18, p. 68.
738 I. Mark, Pamiati I. M. Tcherikover (In memory of I. M. Tcherikover), JW2, pp. 424425.
739 Deutsch, pp. 34.
740 I. lliacheviich (I. Rubinovilch), Chto delay evreiam v Rossii? (What can the Jews do in
Russia?), Soblazn Sotsializma (The Temptation of Socialism), pp. 185186.
741 Schub, JW2*, p. 134.
state in which the people find themselves and the need to have it on our side.742
He was not the only one of the Russian revolutionaries to reason this way.
In the 80s, a current reappeared among the socialists, advocating directing
attention and propaganda to specifically Jewish circles, and preferably the ones
of workers. But, as proletariat, there were not many people among the Jews
some carpenters, binders, shoemakers. The easiest was certainly to act among
the most educated printers. Isaac Gurvitch recounts: with Moses Khourguine,
Leon Rogaller, Joseph Reznik, in Minsk we had set ourselves the task of
creating a nucleus of educated workers. But if we take, for example, Belostok
or Grodno, we found no working class: the recruitment was too weak.
The creation of these circles was not done openly; it was necessary to
conspire either to organise the meeting outside the city, or to hold it in a private
apartment in the city, but then systematically beginning with lessons of Russian
grammar or natural sciences and then only by recruiting volunteers to preach
socialism to them. As I. Martar explains: it was these preliminary lessons that
attracted people to the revolutionary circles. Skilled and wise, capable of
becoming their own masters, those who had attended our meetings had
received instruction there, and especially mastery of Russian, for language is a
precious weapon in the competitive struggle of petty commerce and industry;
After that, our lucky guys, freed from the role of hired labourers and swearing
to their great gods that they themselves would never employ hired labour, had to
have recourse to it, due to the requirements of the market.743 Or, once formed
in these circles, the worker abandoned his trade and went away to take
examinations externally.744
The local Jewish bourgeoisie disliked the participation of young people in
the revolutionary circles, for it had understoodfaster and better than the police
where all of this would lead.745
Here and there, however, things advanced; with the aid of socialist
pamphlets and proclamations provided by the printing press in London, the
young revolutionaries themselves drafted socialdemocrat formulations on all
programmatic questions. Thus, for ten years, a slow propaganda led little by
little to the creation of the Bund.
But, even more than police persecution, it was the emerging immigration
to America that hampered our work. In fact, we trained socialist workers for
America. The concise recollections of Isaac Gurvitch on the first Jewish
workers circles are enamelled by obiter dicta such as: Schwartz, a student who
participated in revolutionary agitation, subsequently immigrated to America;
he lives in New York.as well, at a meeting in Joseph Rezniks apartment:
There were two workers present, a carpenter and a joiner: both are now in
742 Ibidem, pp. 133134.
743 I. Martov, Zapiski sotsialdemokrata (Notebooks of a SocialDemocrat), Berlin, ed.
Grjebine, 1922, pp. 187189.
744 N. A. Buchbinder, Rabotchiie o propagandistskikh kroujkakh (Workers in regard to circles
of propagandists), Soblazn sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), p. 230.
745 Gurvitch, Byloie, op. cit., pp. 6568, 74.
America. And, two pages later, we learn that Reznik himself, after his return
from exile, went to live in America. Conversely, a young man named
Guirchfeld, who came from America to do revolutionary work, is currently a
doctor in Minneapolis and was a Socialist candidate for the post of governor.
One of the most active members of the first Abramovich circle, a certain
Jacob Zvirine, after serving his twelve months in the Kresty prison
immigrated to America and now lives in New York.Shmulevich (Kivel)
in 1889 was forced to flee from Russia; he lived until 1896 in Switzerland
where he was an active member of the social democratic organisations, then
he moved to America and lives in Chicago. Finally, the narrator himself:
In 1890 I myself left Russia, although a few years earlier we were
considering things differently. To lead a socialist propaganda among the workers
is the obligation of every honest educated man: it is our way of paying our
historical debt to the people. And since I have the obligation to make
propaganda, it follows very obviously that I have the right to demand that I be
given the opportunity to fulfil this obligation. Arriving in New York in 1890,
Gurvich found there a Russian workers association of selfdevelopment,
consisting almost exclusively of artisans from Minsk, and in order to celebrate
the Russian New Year they organised in New York The Ball of the Socialists of
Minsk.746 In New York, the local socialist movement predominantly was
Jewish.747
As we can see, from that time the ocean did not constitute a major obstacle
to the cohesion and the pursuit of the revolutionary action carried out by the
Jews. This living link would have oh so striking effects in Russia.
Yet all Jewish young people had not abandoned the Russian revolutionary
tradition, far from it; many even stood there in the 80s and 90s. As D. Schub
shows, the pogroms and the restrictive measures of Alexander III only excited
them even more strongly for combat.
Then it became necessary to explain as well as possible to the little Russian
people why so many Jews participated in the revolutionary movement.
Addressing uneducated people, the popular pamphlets gradually forged a whole
phraseology that had its effects until 1917including 1917. It is a booklet of
this kind that allows us to reconstruct their arguments.
Hard is the fate of the Russian, the subject of the Tsar; the government
holds him in his iron fist. But still more bitter is the lot of the indigent Jew:
the government makes fun of him, pressures him to death. His existence is
only a life of famine, a long agony, and his brothers of misery and toil, the
peasants and the Russian workers, as long as they are in ignorance, treat him
as a foreigner. There followed, one after the other, didactic questions: Are
Jewish capitalists enemies of the working people of Russia? The enemies are
all capitalists without distinction, and it is of little importance to the working
people to be plundered by such and such: one should not concentrate their anger

746 Ibidem, pp. 6668, 7277.

747 J. Krepliak, Poslesloviie k statie Lessina (Postface to the article by Lessine), JW2, p. 392.
on those who are Jews.The Jew has no land he has no means to prosper. If
the Jews do not devote themselves to the labour of the land, it is because the
Russian government has not allowed them to reside in the countryside; but in
their colonies they are excellent cultivators. The fields are superbly
enhanced by the work of their arms. They do not use any outside labour, and
do not practice any extra trade they like the hard work of the land.Are
destitute Jews harming the economic interests of Russian workers? If the Jews
do business, it is out of necessity, not out of taste; all other ways are closed to
them, and one has to live; they would cease with joy to trade if they were
allowed to leave their cage. And if there are thieves among them, we must
accuse the Tsarist government. The Jewish workers began the struggle for the
improvement of their condition at the time when the Russian working people
were subjected. The Jewish workers before all the others have lost patience;
And even now tens of thousands of Jews are members of Russian Socialist
parties. They spread the hatred of the capitalist system and the tsarist
government through the country; they have rendered a proud service to the
Russian working people, and that is why Russian capitalists hate them. The
government, through the police, assisted in the preparation of the pogroms; it
sent the police and the army to lend a helping hand to the looters; Fortunately,
very few workers and peasants were among them.Yes, the Jewish masses
hate this irresponsible tsarist government, because it was the will of the
government that the skull of Jewish children be smashed against walls that
Jewish women, elderly and children alike, be raped in the streets. And yet, He
lies boldly, the one who treats the Jews as enemies of the Russian people And
besides, how could they hate Russia? Could they have another country?748
There are amazing resurgences in the revolutionary tradition. In 1876, A.
Biebergal had been convicted for taking part in the demonstration on the square
in front of Our Lady of Kazan. And it was there that his eldest daughter, a
student of graduate studies of Saint Petersburg, was apprehended on the same
spot in Kazan on the anniversary of this demonstration, twentyfive years later,
in 1901. (In 1908, Member of a group S.R.749, she was condemned to the penal
colonies for the attack on the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich.750)
In fact, over the years, Russian revolutionaries increasingly needed the
input of the Jews; they understood more and more what advantage they derived
from themof their dual struggle: against the vexations on the plane of
nationality, and against those of an economic orderas a detonator for the
revolution.

748 Abramova, Vragi li trudovomou narodou evrei? (Are the Jews enemies of the working
people?), Tiflis, Izdatelskaia Komissiia Kraicvogo Soveta Kavkazskoi armii (Editorial
Commission of the Regional Soviet of the Caucasian Army), 1917, pp. 331.
749 S.R.: SocialRevolutionary party. Born in 1901, it preached terror. Subjected to splits after
the revolution of 1905. Remained powerful among the intelligentsia.
750 Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich (18471909): brother of Alexander III, father of the
Grand Duke Cyril.
 In 1883, in Geneva, appears what can be considered as the head of the
emerging social democracy: the Liberation of Labour group. Its founders
were, along with Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, L. Deutsch and P. Axelrod. 751
(When Ignatov died in 1885, he was replaced by Ingerman.)
In Russia comes to life a current that supports them. Constituted of former
members of the dismantled Black Repartition (they considerably exceeded those
of the Will of the People), they will be called liberationists (osvobojdentsy).
Among them are a number of young Jews, among whom we can name the two
best known: Israel Guelfand (the future and famous Parvus) and Raphael
Soloveitchik. In 1889 Soloveitchik, who had travelled through Russia to set up
revolutionary action in several cities, was arrested and tried with other members
of the Liberation of Labour group, which included several Jewish names. 752
Others who belonged to this social revolutionary trend were David Goldendach,
the future, wellknown Bolshevik Riazanov (who had fled Odessa in 1889
and had taken refuge abroad to escape military service753).
Nevertheless, what remained of the Will of the People after its collapse was
a fairly large group. Among them were Dembo, Rudevitch, Mandelstam, Boris
Reinchtein, Ludwig Nagel, Bek, Sofia Chentsis, Filippeo, Leventis, Cheftel,
Barnekhovsky, etc.754
Thus a certain amount of energy had been preserved to fuel the rivalries
between small groupsThe Will of the People, The Black Repartition,
Liberation of Labourand theoretical debates. The three volumes of the
Historical and Revolutionary Collection published in the (Soviet) 20s, which
we use here, offer us, in an interminable and tedious logorrhea, an account of
the cut and thrust, allegedly much more important and sublime than all the
questions of universal thought and history. The detail of these debates constitute
a deadly material on the spiritual fabric of the Russian revolutionaries of the
years 8090, and it still awaits its historian.
But from the thirties of the Soviet era onwards, it was no longer possible to
enumerate with pride and detail all those who had had their share in the
revolution; a sort of taboo settled in historical and political publications, the role
and name of the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement ceased to be
evokedand even now, this kind of evocation creates uneasiness. Now, nothing
is more immoral and dangerous than to silence anything when History is being
written: it only creates a distortion of opposite meaning.
If, as can be read in the Jewish Encyclopdia, to account for the genuine
importance of the Jewish component in the Russian liberation movement, to
express it in precise figures, does not seem possible, 755 one can nevertheless,
based on various sources, give an approximate picture.

751 Deutsch, p. 136.

752 RHC, t. 2, pp. 36, 3840.
753 Ibidem, t. 2, pp. 198199.
754 Ibidem, p. 36.
755 JE, t. 13, p. 645.
 Hessen informs us that of the 376 defendants, accused of crimes against
the State in the first half of 1879, there were only 4% Jews, and out of the
1,054 persons tried before the Senate during the year 1880, there were 6.5%
of Jews.756 Similar estimates are found among other authors.
However, from decade to decade, the number of Jews participating in the
revolutionary movement increases, their role becomes more influential, more
recognised. In the early years of Soviet rule, when it was still a matter of pride,
a prominent communist, LourieLarine, said: In tsarist prisons and in exile,
Jews usually constituted nearly a quarter of all prisoners and exiles.757 Marxist
historian M. N. Pokrovsky, basing himself on the workforce of the various
congresses, concludes that the Jews represent between a quarter and a third of
the organisations of all the revolutionary parties.758 (The modern Jewish
Encyclopdia has some reservations about this estimate).
In 1903, in a meeting with Herzl, Witte endeavoured to show that, while
representing only 5% of the population of Russia, i.e. 6 million out of 136
million, the Jews had in their midst no less than 50% of revolutionaries.759
General N. Sukhotin, commanderinchief of the Siberian region, compiled
statistics on January 1st, 1905 of political prisoners under surveillance for all of
Siberia and by nationality. This resulted in 1,898 Russians (42%), 1,678 Jews
(37%), 624 Poles (14%), 167 Caucasians, 85 Baltic and 94 of other
nationalities. (Only the exiles are counted there, prisons and penal colony
convicts are not taken into account, and the figures are only valid for the year
1904, but this, however, gives a certain overview.) There is, moreover, an
interesting precision in connection with those who went into hiding: 17% of
Russians, 64% of Jews, 19% of other nationalities.760
Here is the testimony of V. Choulguine: in 1889, the news relating to the
student demonstrations of Saint Petersburg reached Kiev. The long corridors of
the university were teeming with a crowd of young people in effervescence. I
was struck by the predominance of the Jews. Were they more or less numerous
than the Russians, I could not say, but they predominated incontestably, for it
was they who were in charge of this tumultuous melee in jackets. Some time
later, the professors and the nonstriking students began to be chased out of
lecture halls. Then this pure and holy youth took false photographs of the
Cossacks beating the students; these photographs were said to have been taken
on the fly when they were made from drawings: Not all Jewish students are
leftwingers, some were on our side, but those ones suffered a lot afterwards,
they were harassed by society. Choulguine adds: The role of the Jews in the

756 Hessen, t. 2, p. 212.

757 I. Larme, Evrei i AntiSemitism v SSSR (The Jews and AntiSemitism in the USSR), ML,
1929, p. 31.
758 SJE, t. 7*, 1994, p. 258.
759 G. Svet, Rousskiie evrei v sionizme i v stroitelstve Palestiny i Izrailia (The Russian Jews in
Zionism and the Edification of Israel), p. 258.
760 Iz islorii borby s revolioutsici v 1905 g. (Fragments of the History of the Fight with the
Revolution of 1905), Krasnyi arkhiv (Red Archives), 1929, vol. 32, p. 229.
revolutionary effervescence within universities was notorious and unrelated to
their number across the country.761
Milyukov described all this as legends about the revolutionary spirit of the
Jews They [government officials] need legends, just like the primitive man
needs rhymed prose.762 Conversely, G. P. Fedotov wrote: The Jewish nation,
morally liberated from the 80s onwards, like the Russian intelligentsia under
Peter the Great, is in the highest degree uprooted, internationalist and active
It immediately assumed the leading role in the Russian revolution It marked
the moral profile of the Russian revolutionary with its incisive and sombre
character.763 From the 80s onwards, the Russian and Jewish elites merged not
only in a common revolutionary action, but also in all spiritual fads, and
especially in the passion for nonrootedness.
In the eyes of a contemporary, simple witness to the facts (Zinaida
Altanskaya, who corresponded from the town of Orel with Fyodor Kryukov 764),
this Jewish youth of the beginning of the century appeared as follows: with
them, there is the art and the love of fighting. And what projects!vast, bold!
They have something of their own, a halo of suffering, something precious. We
envy them, we are vexed (that the Russian youth is not the same).
M. Agursky states the following hypothesis: Participation in the
revolutionary movement was, so to speak, a form of assimilation [more]
suitable than the common assimilation through baptism; and it appears all the
more worthy because it also meant a sort of revolt against ones own Jewish
bourgeoisie765and against ones own religion, which counted for nothing for
the revolutionaries.
However, this proper assimilation was neither complete nor even real:
many of these young men, in their haste, tore themselves from their own soil
without really taking root in Russian soil, and remained outside these two
nations and two cultures, to be nothing more than this material of which
internationalism is so fond of.
But as the equal rights of the Jews remained one of the major demands of
the Russian revolutionary movement, these young people, by embarking in the
revolution, kept in their hearts and minds, the idea they were still serving the
interests of their people. This was the thesis that Parvus had adopted as a course

761 V. V. Choulguine, Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa: Ob antisemitizme v Rossii. (What we

do not like about them: antiSemitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, pp. 5354, 191.
762 Duma State, 4th Legislature, Transcripts of Meetings, Session 5, Meeting 18, 16 Dec. 1916,
p. 1174.
763 G. P. Fedotov, Litso Rossii; Sbornik stratei (The Face of Russia, collection of articles)
(19181931), Paris, YMCA Press, 1967, pp. 113114.
764 Fyodor Dmitrievich Kryukov (18701920): writer of the Gift, populist, died of typhus
during the civil war. He has been attributed the true paternity of the Peaceful Gift of the
Cholokov Nobel prize.
765 M. Agursky, Sovmcslimy li sionizm i sotsializm? (Are Zionism and socialism compatible?),
22, Obschestvennopolititchcskii i literaturnyi journal evreiskoi intellignntsii iz SSSR V
Izrail (22: social and political review of Jewish intellectuals emigrated from the USSR in
Israel), TelAviv, 1984, No. 36. p. 130.
of action during his entire life, which he had formulated, defended and
inculcated to the young people: the liberation of the Jews from Russia can only
be done by overthrowing the Tsarist regime.
This thesis found significant support for a particular layer of Jewish society
middleaged people, welloff, set, incredibly estranged from the spirit of
adventure, but who, since the end of the nineteenth century, fed a permanent
irritation against the Russian mode of government. It was in this ideological
field that their children grew up before they even received the sap of Judaism to
subsist from. An influential member of the Bund, Mr. Raies, points out that at
the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Jewish bourgeoisie did
not hide the hopes and expectations it placed in the progress of the
revolutionary movement it, which it once rejected, now had the bourgeoisies
favours.766
G. Gershuni explained to his judges: It is your persecutions that have
driven us to the revolution. In fact, the explanation is to be found both in
Jewish history and in Russian historyat their intersection.
Let us listen to G. A. Landau, a renowned Jewish publicist. He wrote after
1917: There were many Jewish families, both small and middleclass, in which
the parents, bourgeois themselves, saw with their benevolent eyes, sometimes
proud, always quiet, their offspring being marked by the seal in fashion of one
of the socialrevolutionary ideologies in vogue. They also, in fact, leaned
vaguely in favour of this ideology which protested against the persecutors, but
without asking what was the nature of this protest or what were these
persecutions. And it was thus that little by little, the hegemony of socialism
took root in Jewish societythe negation of civil society and of the State,
contempt for bourgeois culture, and of the inheritance of past centuries, an
inheritance from which the Jews had less difficulty to tear themselves away
from since they already had, by Europeanising themselves, renounced their own
inheritance. The revolutionary ideas in the Jewish milieu were doubly
destructive, and for Russia and for themselves. But they penetrated the Jewish
milieu much more deeply than the Russian milieu.767
A jeweller from Kiev, Marchak (who even created some pieces to decorate
the churches of the city), testifies that while I was frequenting the bourgeoisie,
I was contaminated [by the revolutionary spirit]. 768 Moreover, this is what we
see with the young Bogrov769: that energy, that passion which grows in him
766 M. Rafes, Natsionalistitcheskii ouklon Bunda (The nationalist tendency of the Bund),
Soblazn Sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), p. 276.
767 G. A. Landau, Rcvolioutsionnyie idei v evreiskoi obschestvennosti (Revolutionary ideas in
Jewish public opinion), Rossiia i evrei: Sb. 1 (Russia and the Jews, Collection 1).
Otetchestvennoie obiedineniie ruskikh evreiev zagranitsei (Patriotic Union of Russian Jews
Abroad), Paris, YMCA Press, 1978 (Berlin, Osnova, 1924), pp. 106109.
768 A. O. Marchak, Inlerviou radiostanlsii Svoboda (Interview at Radio Liberty),
Vospominaniia o revolioutsii 1917 goda (Memories on the Revolution of 1917), Int. No. 17,
Munich, 1965, p. 9
769 Dmitry Grigoryevich Bogrov: young secret service agent. Shot and killed the minister A.
Stolypine in Kiev (1911). Condemned to death and executed.
during his youth spent in the bosom of a very rich family. His father, a wealthy
liberal, gave full liberty to his young terrorist son.And the Gotz brothers, also
terrorists, had for grandfathers two Muscovites rich as Croesus, Gotz on the one
hand, and on the other, Vyssotsky, a multimillionaire tea maker, and these, far
from retaining their grandchildren, paid to the S.R. hundreds of thousands of
rubles.
Many Jews have come to swell the ranks of the Socialists, continues
Landau.770 In one of his speeches in the Duma (1909), A. I. Guchkov quotes the
testimony of a young S.R.: among other causes of her disenchantment, she
said that the revolutionary movement was entirely monopolised by the Jews and
that they saw in the triumph of the revolution their own triumph.771
The enthusiasm for the revolution has seized Jewish society from the
bottom to the top, says I. O. Levin: It is not only the lower strata of the Jewish
population of Russia that have devoted themselves to the revolutionary
passion, but this movement could not fail to catch a large part of the
intellectuals and semiintellectuals of the Jewish people (semiintellectuals
who, in the 20s, constituted the active executives of the Soviet regime). They
were even more numerous among the liberal professions, from dentists to
university teachersthose who could settle outside the Pale of Settlement.
Having lost the cultural heritage of traditional Judaism, these people were
nonetheless foreign to Russian culture and any other national culture. This
spiritual vacuum, hidden under a superficially assimilated European culture,
made the Jews, already inclined to materialism, by their trades as tradesmen or
craftsmen, very receptive to materialistic political theories The rationalist
mode of thought peculiar to the Jews predisposes them to adhere to doctrines
such as that of revolutionary Marxism.772
The coauthor of this collection, V. S. Mandel, remarks: Russian Marxism
in its purest state, copied from the original German, was never a Russian
national movement, and Jews in Russia, who were animated by a revolutionary
spirit, for which nothing could be easier than assimilating a doctrine exhibited
in books in German, were naturally led to take an important part in the work of
transplanting this foreign fruit on Russian soil. 773 F. A. Stepun expressed it
thus: The Jewish youth boldly discussed, quoting Marx in support, the
question of the form in which the Russian moujik should possess the land. The

770 Landau, op. cit., p. 109.

771 A. Guchkov, Retch v Gosoudarstvennoi Doume 16 dek. 1909; Po zaprosou o vzryvc na
Astrakhanskoi oulitse (Speech to the State Duma of 16 Dec. 1909, enquiry into the
explosion of Astrakhan Street), A. I. Goutchkov v Tretei Gosoudarstvennoi Doume (1907
1912 Gg.): Cb. Retchei (A. I. Guchkov to the third State Duma) (19071912), Collection of
speeches, Saint Petersburg, 1912, pp. 143144.
772 I. O. Levin, Evrei u revolioutsi (The Jews and the Revolution), Rossia i evrei (Russia and
the Jews), op. Cit., pp. 130132.
773 V. S. Mandel, Konservativnyiee i razrouchitelnyie idei v evreistve (Conservative ideas and
destructive ideas in Jewish society), ibidem, p 199.
Marxist movement began in Russia with the Jewish youth inside the Pale of
Settlement.
Developing this idea, V. S. Mandel recalls The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, this stupid and hateful falsity. Well, these Jews see in the delusions
of the Protocols the malicious intention of the antiSemites to eradicate
Judaism, but they themselves are ready, in varying degrees, to organise the
world on new principles, and believe that the revolution marks a step forward
towards the establishment of the heavenly Kingdom on earth, and attribute to
the Jewish people, for its greatest glory, the role of leader of the popular
movements for freedom, equality and justicea leader who, of course, does not
hesitate to break down the existing political and social regime. And he gives as
an example a quotation from the book of Fritz Kahn, The Hebrews as a Race
and People of Culture: Moses, one thousand two hundred and fifty years
before Jesus Christ, proclaimed the rights of man Christ paid with his life the
preaching of Communist manifestos in a capitalist state, then in 1848, the star
of Bethlehem rose for the second time and it rose again above the roofs of
Judea: Marx.774
Thus, of this common veneration for the revolution emerge and
distinguish certain currents of opinion in Jewish societyall desperately
unrealistic, childishly pretentious, thereby irresistibly aspiring to a troubled era,
and not in Russia alone, but encompassing the entire century.775
With what casualness and what gravity at the same time, with what
beautiful promises Marxism penetrates into the consciousness of cultivated
Russia! Finally, the revolution has found its scientific foundation with its
cortge of infallible deductions and inevitable predictions!
Among the young Marxists, there is Julius Tsederbaum; Martov, the future
great leader of the Mensheviks, who, together with his best friend Lenin, will
first found the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class
(of all Russia)only he will not enjoy the same protection as Lenin, exiled in
the merciful country of Minousine: he will have to serve his three years in the
tough region of Tourukhan. It was he, too, who, together with Lenin, designed
the Iskra776 and set up a whole network for its dissemination.
But even before collaborating with Lenin to found the AllRussian Social
Democratic Party, Martov, then exiled to Vilnius, had set up the ideological and
organisational foundations of a Jewish Joint Labour Union for Lithuania,
Poland and Russia. Martovs idea was that, from now on, propaganda within
the masses should be favoured as work within the circles, and, for this, make it
more specifically Jewish, and, in particular, translate it into Yiddish. In his
lecture, Martov described the principles of the new Union: We expected
774 Mandel, ibidem, pp. 172173.
775 I. M. Biekerman, Rossiya i rouskoie evreistvo (Russia and the Jews of Russia), ibidem, p.
34.
776 The Iskra (The Spark) is the first Marxist newspaper created by Lenin abroad. Was
published from 1900 to 1903. Was resumed by the Mensheviks and was published until
1905.
everything from the movement of the Russian working class and considered
ourselves as an appendix of the panRussian workers movement we had
forgotten to maintain the link with the Jewish mass who does not know
Russian. But at the same time, without suspecting it, we hoisted the Jewish
movement to a height unmatched by the Russians. Now is the time to free the
Jewish movement from the mental oppression to which the [Jewish]
bourgeoisie has subjected it, which is the lowest and lowest bourgeoisie in
the world, to create a specifically Jewish workers organisation, which will
serve as guide and instructor for the Jewish proletariat. In the national
character of the movement, Martov saw a victory over the bourgeoisie, and
with this we are perfectly safe from nationalism. 777 In the following year,
Plekhanov, at the Congress of the International Socialist, described the Jewish
SocialDemocratic movement as the vanguard of the workingclass army in
Russia.778 It was the latter which became the Bund (Vilnius, 1897), six months
before the creation of the SocialDemocratic Party of Russia. The next stage is
the First Congress of the Russian SocialDemocratic Party, which takes place in
Minsk (where the Central Committee of the Bund was located) in 1898. The
Jewish Encyclopdia tells us that out of eight delegates, five were Jewish: the
envoys of a Kiev newspaper, The Workers Gazette, B. Eidelman, N.
Vigdorchik, and those of the Bund: A. Kremer, A. Mutnik, S. Katz [were also
present Radchenko, Petruyvitch and Vannovsky] . Within the Central
Committee of the party (of three members) which was constituted at this
Congress entered A. Kremer and B. Eidelman.779 Thus was born the Social
Democratic Labour Party of Russia, in a close relationship with the Bund. (Let
us add: even before the creation of Iskra, it was to Lenin that the direction of the
newspaper of the Bund had been proposed.780)
The fact that the Bund was created in Vilnius is not surprising: Vilnius was
the Lithuanian Jerusalem, a city inhabited by a whole cultivated Jewish elite,
and through which transited, in provenance of the West, all the illegal literature
heading to Saint Petersburg and Moscow.781
But the Bund, despite its internationalist ideology, became a factor of
national unity of Jewish life, even though its leaders were guarding against
nationalism as if it were the plague (like the Russian SocialDemocrats who
succeeded in watching out for it until the end). While subsidies flowed from
abroad, consented by the wealthy Jewish milieus, the Bund advocated the

777 I. Martov, Povorotnyi punkt v istorii evreiskogo rabotchego dvijeniia (A turning point in the
history of the workers movement Soblazn Sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), pp.
249, 259264, JE, t. 5, p. 94.
778 G. V. Plekhanov o sotsialistitcheskom dvijenii sredi evreiev (G. V. Plekhanov on the
socialist movement among the Jews), Soblazn Sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), p.
266.
779 SJE, t. 7, p. 396.
780 V. I. Lenin, Sotchincniia (Works in 45 vols., 4th ed.), Gospolitizdat, 19411967, vol. 5, pp.
463464, 518.
781 Schub, JW2, p. 137.
principle that there is not a single Jewish people, and rejected the idea of a
universal Jewish nation,782 claiming on the contrary, that there are exist two
antagonistic classes within the Jewish people (the Bund feared that nationalistic
dispositions might obscure the class consciousness of the proletariat).
However, there was hardly any Jewish proletariat in the strict sense of the
term: the Jews seldom entered factories, as F. Kohn explains, they considered
it disgraceful not to be their own master, albeit very modestlyas an artisan or
even an apprentice, when one can nurture the hope of opening ones own
workshop. To be hired in a factory was to lose all illusions as to the possibility
of becoming one day ones own master, and that is why working in a factory
was a humiliation, a disgrace.783 (Another obstacle was the reluctance of
employers to hire workers whose day of rest was Saturday and not Sunday.) As
a result, the Bund declared Jewish proletariat both the artisans, and small
traders, and clerks (was not every employed worker a proletarian, according to
Marx?), and even commercial intermediaries. To all these individuals the
revolutionary spirit could be inculcated, and they had be joined to the struggle
against the autocracy. The Bund even declared that the Jews are the best
proletariat in the world.784 (The Bund never renounced the idea of
strengthening its work among Christian workers.)
Not suspected of sympathy for socialism, G. B. Sliosberg writes in this
regard that the enormous propaganda deployed by the Bund and some of its
interventions have done harm, and in particular an immediate damage to
Jewish trade and their startup industries. The Bund was turning against the
employing instructors the very young apprentices, kids of 1415 years old; its
members broke the tiles of more or less opulent Jewish houses. In addition,
on YomKippur, young people from the Bund went into the great synagogue
[in Vilnius], interrupted the prayer and started an incredible party, with beer
flowing abundantly785
But, in spite of its class fanaticism, the Bund was increasingly based on a
universal current equally characteristic of bourgeois liberalism: It was
increasingly understood in the cultivated world that the national idea plays an
essential role in the awakening of selfconsciousness in every man, which
obliged the theoreticians of the proletarian circles themselves to raise more
broadly the national question; thus, in the Bund, assimilationist tendencies
were gradually supplanted by national tendencies.786This, Jabotinsky
782 Aronson, V borbe za (In the fight for), BJWR1, p. 222.
783 Revolioutsionnoie dvijeniie sredi evreiev (The revolutionary movement among the Jews)
Sb. 1, M.; Vsesoiouznoie Obschestvo Politkatorjan i Ssylnoposelentsev (Collection 1, M.,
Association for the Soviet Union of Prisoners and Political Exiles), 1930, p. 25.
784 S. Dimanstein, Revolioutsionnoie dvijeniie sredi evreiev (The Revolutionary Movement
Among the Jews), Sb. 1905: Istoriia rcvolioutsionnogo dvijeniia v otdelnykh otcherkakh
(Collection 1905: History of the Revolutionary Movement, some separate studies), directed
by N. Pokrovsky, T. 3, Book 1, ML., 1927, pp. 127, 138, 156.
785 G. B. Sliosberg, Dela minouvehikh dnei: Zapiski ruskogo evreia (Things of the Past: Notes
of a Russian Jew), 3 vols., Paris, 19331934, vol. 3, pp. 136137.
786 JE, t. 3, p. 337.
confirms: As it grows, the Bund replaces a national ideology with
cosmopolitanism.787 Abram Amsterdam, one of the first important leaders of
the Bund, who died prematurely, tried to reconcile the Marxist doctrine with
the ideas of nationalism.788In 1901, at a congress of the Bund, one of the
future leaders of the year Seventeen, Mark Lieber (M. I. Goldman), who was
then a young man of 20, declared: so far we have been cosmopolitan believers.
We must become national. Do not be afraid of the word. National does not
mean nationalist. (May we understand it, even if it is ninety years late!) And,
although this congress had endorsed a resolution against the exaltation of the
national sentiment which leads to chauvinism, he also pronounced himself for
the national autonomy of the Jews regardless of the territory inhabited by
them.789
This slogan of national autonomy, the Bund developed it for a few years,
both in its propaganda and its campaign of political banquets of 1904
although nobody knew exactly what could mean autonomy without territory.
Thus, every Jewish person was given the right to use only his own language in
his dealings with the local administration and the organs of the State but
how? (For should not this right also be granted to the nationals of other
nations?)
It should also be noted that, in spite of its socialist tendencies, the Bund, in
its socialdemocratic programme, pronounced itself against the demand for
the restoration of Poland and against constituent assemblies for the marches
of Russia.790 Nationalism, yesbut for oneself alone?
Thus, the Bund admitted only Jews in its midst. And once this orientation
was taken, and although it was radically anticlerical, it did not accept the Jews
who had denied their religion. The parallel Russian SocialDemocratic
organisations, the Bund, call them Christianand, moreover, how could they
be represented differently? But what a cruel offence for Lenin791 to be so
catalogued among the Christians!
The Bund thus embodies the attempt to defend Jewish interests, in
particular against Russian interests. Here too, Sliosberg acknowledges: The
Bunds action has resulted in a sense of dignity and awareness of the rights of
Jewish workers.792
Subsequently, the Bunds relations with the Russian SocialDemocratic
Party were not easy. As with the Polish Socialist Party, which at the time of the
birth of the Bund had an extremely suspicious attitude towards it and declared
that the isolationism of the Bund places it in an adversarial position in relation

787 V. Jabotinski, Vvdeniie (Preface) to Kh. N. Bialik, Pesni i poemy (Songs and poems), Saint
Petersburg, ed. Zaltsman, 1914, p. 36.
788 JE, t. 2, p. 354.
789 Aronson, V borbe za (In the fight for), BJWR1*, pp. 220222.
790 JE, t. 5, p. 99.
791 Lenin, 4th ed., Vol. 6, p. 298.
792 Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 258.
to us.793 Given its increasingly nationalistic tendencies, the Bund could only
have conflicting relations with the other branches of Russian SocialDemocracy.
Lenin thus describes the discussion he and Martov had with Plekhanov in
Geneva in September 1900: G. V.794 shows a phenomenal intolerance by
declaring that [i.e. the Bund] is in no way a socialdemocratic organisation, but
that it is simply an exploiting organisation that takes advantage of the Russians;
he says that our aim is to drive this Bund out of the Party, that the Jews are all
without exception chauvinists and nationalists, that the Russian party must be
Russian and not turn itself in bound hand and foot to the tribe of Gad795 G.
V. has stuck to his positions without wanting to reconsider them, saying that we
simply lack knowledge of the Jewish world and experience in dealing with
it.796 (From what ear Martov, the first initiator of the Bund, must have heard
this diatribe?!)
In 1898 the Bund, despite its greater seniority, agreed to join the Russian
SocialDemocratic Party, but as a whole, with full autonomy over Jewish
affairs. It therefore agreed to be a member of the Russian party, but on condition
that it did not interfere in its affairs. Such was the agreement between them.
However, at the beginning of 1902, the Bund considered that autonomy, so
easily obtained at the 1st Congress of the Social Democratic Party, was no
longer enough for it and that it now wanted to join the party on a federal basis,
benefiting of full independence, even in programme matters. Regarding this it
published a pamphlet against the Iskra.797 The central argument, Lenin explains,
was that the Jewish proletariat is a part of the Jewish people, which occupies a
special place among the nations.798
At this stage, Lenin sees red and feels obliged to clash with the Bund
himself. He no longer calls only to maintain pressure [against autocracy] by
avoiding a fragmentation of the party into several independent formations,799
but he embarks on a passionate argument to prove (following, admittedly,
Kautsky) that Jews are by no means a nation: they have neither common
language nor territory (a flatly materialistic judgement: the Jews are one of the
most authentic nations, the most united found on earth. United, it is in spirit. In
his superficial and vulgar internationalism, Lenin could not understand the
depth or historical roots of the Jewish question.) The idea of a separate Jewish
people is politically reactionary,800 it justifies Jewish particularism. (And all the
more reactionary were Zionists to him!) Lenin saw a solution for the Jews

793 JE*, t. 5, p. 95.

794 G. V.: Georgiy Valentinovich Plekhanov (18561918). Socialdemocrat, Marxist, leading
member of The Will of the People. Emigrated in 1880. Leader of the Menshevik party.
795 Gad. One of the twelve sons of Jacob. One of the twelve tribes of Israel.
796 Lenin, 4th ed., Vol. 4, p. 311.
797 JE, t. 5, pp. 9697.
798 Lenin, 4th ed., t.7, p.77.
799 Ibidem, t. 6, p. 300.
800 Ibidem, t. 7, pp. 8384.
only in their total assimilationwhich amounts to saying, in fact, to cease
outright being Jewish.
In the summer of 1903, at the 2nd Congress of the SocialDemocratic Party
of Russia in Brussels, out of 43 delegates, there were only five of the Bund
(however, many Jews participated). And Martov, supported by twelve Jews
(among them Trotsky, Deutsch, Martynov, Liadov, to name but a few), spoke on
behalf of the party against the federal principle demanded by the Bund. The
members of the Bund then left the Congress (which permitted Lenins proposed
statutes in paragraph 1 to prevail), and then also left the party.801 (After the split
of the Social Democratic Party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the leaders of
the Mensheviks were A. Axelrod, A. Deutsch, L. Martov, M. Lieber, L.
Trotsky,802 as well as F. Dan, R. AbramovichPlekhanov remaining on the
sidelines.)
On the Street of the Jews, as it was then called, the Bund quickly became
a powerful and active organisation. Until the eve of the events of 1905, the
Bund was the most powerful socialdemocratic organisation in Russia, with a
wellestablished apparatus, good discipline, united members, flexibility and
great experience in conspiring. Nowhere else is there a discipline like in the
Bund. The bastion of the Bund was the NorthWest region.803
However, formidable competition arose with the Independent Jewish
Workers Party which was created in 1901 under the influence and the
exhortations of Zubatov804: it persuaded the Jewish workers and all who would
listen that it was not the social democratic ideology they needed but struggle
against the bourgeoisie defending their economic interests to themthe
government was interested in their success, they could act legally, their
authority would a benevolent referee. The head of this movement was the
daughter of a miller, the intrepid Maria Vilbouchevitch. The supporters of
Zubatov enjoyed great success in Minsk with the (Jewish) workers; they
were passionately opposed to the members of the Bund and obtained much by
organising economic strikes. They also acted, not without success, in Odessa
(Khuna Shayevich). But just as, throughout the country, the frightened
government (and Plehve805) foiled Zubatovs project , likewise with the
independents: Shayevich was arrested in 1903, sentenced to a fairly short
sentencebut then came the news of the Kishinev pogrom, and the
independents had their hands tied.806

801 JE, t. 5, p. 97; SJE, I. 7, p. 397.

802 SJE, t. 7, p. 397.
803 Dimanstein, 1905, vol. 3, Book I, pp. 127, 138, 156.
804 Sergei Vasilyevich Zubatov (18641917): Chief of the Moscow Police and Special Police
Department (19021905).
805 Viatcheslav Konstantinovich Plehve (18461904): cunning Minister of the Interior, killed
by the terrorist S. R. Sozonov.
806 N. A. Buchbinder, Nezavissimaia evreiskaia rabolchaia partiia (The Independent Jewish
Workers Party). Krasnaia letopis: lstoritcheskii journal (Red Chronicle: Historical Review),
1922, no. 23, pp. 208241.
 Meanwhile, the Bund was receiving help from foreign groups from
Switzerland first and then from Paris, London, the United States where action
groups had reached sizeable proportions. Organised clubs, Rotarian action
groups, associations of aid to the work of the Bund in Russia. This aid was
mainly financial.807
From 1901, the Bund renounced economic terror (lashing out on
employers, monitoring factories), because it obscured the socialdemocratic
consciousness of the workers, and they pretended equally of condemning
political terror.808 This did not prevent Guirsh Lekkert, a cobbler who was a
member of the Bund, from shooting at the governor of Vilniusand to be
hanged for it. The young Mendel Deutsch, still a minor, also fired shots whose
significance marked the apogee of the movement of the Jewish masses.809 And
already the Bund was wondering if it should not go back to terror. In 1902, the
Berdichev Conference endorsed a resolution on organised revenge. But a
debate broke out in the Bund, and the following year the Congress formally
annulled this decision of the Conference.810 According to Lenin, the Bund, in
1903, went through terrorist temptations, which it then got over.811
Terror, which had already manifested itself more than once in Russia,
enjoyed a general indulgence, an indulgence which was in the air of the time,
and which, with the increasingly widespread custom of holding, just in case, a
firearm (and it was easy to obtain one via smuggling) could not fail to arouse, in
the minds of the youth of the Pale of Settlement, the idea of forming their own
combat regiments.
But the Bund had active and dangerous competitors. Is it a historical
coincidence, or the time had simply come for the Jewish national consciousness
to be reborn, in any case, it is in 1897, the year of the creation of the Bund, just
a month prior, the First Universal Congress of Zionism took place. And it was
in the early 1900s that young Jews pioneered a new path, a public service
path at the crossroads between Iskra and Bne Moshe (the sons of Moses),
some turning right, the others heading left.812 In the programmes of all our
groupings which appeared between 1904 and 1906, the national theme held its
proper place.813 We have seen that the Socialist Bund had not cut it off, and it
now only had to condemn Zionism all the more firmly in order to excite
national sentiment to the detriment of class consciousness.

807 JE, t. 5, p. 101; SJE, t. 1, pp. 559560.

808 JE, t.5, p.96.
809 Dimanstein, 1905, T. 3, Book I, pp. 149150.
810 JE*, t. 5, p. 97.
811 Lenin, 4th ed. 6, p. 288.
812 I. BenTsvi.
813 S. M. Ginzburg, O rousskoevreiskoi intelligentsii (From the RussoJewish Intelligence), Sb.
Evreiski mir; Ejegodnik na 1939 g. (Rcc. The Jewish World, Annual for the year 1939),
Paris, Association of the RussoJewish Intelligence, p. 39.
 It is true that the numbers of the Zionist circles among the youth gave way
to the number of young people adhering to the revolutionary socialist parties.814
(Although there were counterexamples: thus the publisher of the Jewish
Socialist La Pravda of Geneva, G. Gurevitch, had reconverted to devote
himself entirely to the issue of the Jews settlement in Palestine.) The ditch dug
between Zionism and the Bund was gradually filled by such and such a new
party, then another, then a thirdPoaleiTsion, ZeireiTsion, the Zionist
Socialists, the serpovtsy (seimovtsy), each combining in its own way
Zionism and socialism.
It is understandable that between parties so close to one other a fierce
struggle developed, and this did not facilitate the task of the Bund. Nor did the
emigration of the Jews from Russia into Israel, which gained momentum in
those years: why emigrate? What sense does this have when the Jewish
proletariat must fight for socialism side by side with the working class of all
countries, which would automatically solve the Jewish question everywhere?
The Jews have often been criticised in the course of history for the fact that
many of them were usurers, bankers, merchants. Yes, the Jews formed a
significant detachment, creator of the world of capitaland mainly in its
financial forms. This, the great political economist Werner Sombart described it
with a vigorous and convincing pen. In the first years of the Revolution this
circumstance was, on the contrary, attributed to the Jews, as an inevitable
formation on the road to socialism. And in one of his indictments, in 1919,
Krylenko found it necessary to emphasise that the Jewish people, since the
Middle Ages, has taken out of their ranks the holders of a new influence, that of
capital they precipitated the dissolution of economic forms of another
age.815 Yes, of course, the capitalist system in the economic and commercial
field, the democratic system in the political field are largely indebted to the
constructive contribution of the Jews, and these systems in turn are the most
favourable to the development of Jewish life and culture.
Butand this is an unfathomable historical enigmathese systems were
not the only ones that the Jews favoured.
As V. S. Mandel reminds us, if we refer to the Bible, we discover that the
very idea of a monarchy was invented by no other people but the Hebrews, and
they transmitted it to the Christian world. The monarch is not chosen by the
people, he is the chosen by God. Hence the rite which the Christian peoples
have inherited from the coronation and anointing of the kings. 816 (One might
rectify by recalling that the Pharaohs long ago were also anointed, and also
bearers of the divine will.) For his part, the former Russian revolutionary A.
ValtLessine remembers: The Jews did not accord great importance to the
814 Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 133.
815 N. V. Krylenko, Za piat lct. 19181922: Obvinitelnyie retchi po naibolee kroupnym
protsessam, zaslouchannym v Moskovskom i Verkhovnom Revolioutsionnykh Tribounalakh
(Over five years, 19181922: Submissions made in the highest trials before the Supreme
Court and the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal), 1923, p. 353.
816 Mandel, Rossia i evrei (Russia and the Jews), op. Cit., p. 177.
revolutionary movement. They put all their hopes in the petitions addressed to
Saint Petersburg, or even in the bribes paid to the officials of the ministries
but not at all in the revolution. 817 This kind of approach to the influential
spheres received, on the part of the impatient Jewish youth, the sobriquet,
known since the Middle Ages and now infamous, of chtadlan. Someone like G.
B. Sliosberg, who worked for many years in the Senate and the Ministry of the
Interior, and who patiently had to solve Jewish problems of a private nature,
thought that this avenue was the safest, with the richest future for the Jews, and
he was ulcerated to note the impatience of these young people.
Yes, it was perfectly unreasonable, on the part of the Jews, to join the
revolutionary movement, which had ruined the course of normal life in Russia
and, consequently, that of the Jews of Russia. Yet, in the destruction of the
monarchy and in the destruction of the bourgeois orderas, some time before,
in the reinforcement of itthe Jews found themselves in the vanguard. Such is
the innate mobility of the Jewish character, its extreme sensitivity to social
trends and the advancement of the future.
It will not be the first time in the history of mankind that the most natural
impulses of men will suddenly lead to monstrosities most contrary to their
nature.

817 A. Lessine, Epizody iz moei jizni (Episodes of My Life), JW2, p. 388.

 Chapter 7. The Birth of Zionism

How did the Jewish conscience evolve in Russia during the second half of the
nineteenth century? Towards 1910, Vladimir Jabotinsky describes this evolution
in his somewhat passionate manner: at first, the mass of Jews opposed the
Enlightenment, the fanatic prejudice of an overvalued specificity. But time
did its work, and as much Jews, historically, fled humanist culture, as much
they aspire to it now and this thirst for knowledge is so widespread that it
perhaps makes us, Jews of Russia, the first nation in the world. However,
running towards the goal, we passed it. Our goal was to form a Jew who, by
staying Jewish, could live a life that would be that of the universal man, and
now we have totally forgotten that we must remain Jewish, we stopped
attaching a price to our Jewish essence, and it began to weigh on us. We must
extirpate this mentality from selfcontempt and revive the mentality of self
respect We complain that we are despised, but we are not far from despising
ourselves.818
This description reflects the general trend towards assimilation, but not all
aspects of the picture. As we have already seen (chapter 4), in the late sixties of
the nineteenth century, the publicist and man of letters Smolenskin had spoken
out vigorously against the tendency to assimilate Jewish intellectuals, as he had
observed it in Odessa or as it had spread in Germany. And he at once declared
war on both bigots and false devotees who want to drive out all knowledge of
the house of Israel. No! One must not be ashamed of their origins, one must
cherish their national language and dignity; however, national culture can only
be preserved through language, the ancient Hebrew. This is all the more
important because Judaism deprived of territory is a particular phenomenon,
a spiritual nation.819 The Jews are indeed a nation, not a religious
congregation. Smolenskin advanced the doctrine of progressive Jewish
nationalism.820
Throughout the 70s, Smolenskins voice remained practically unheard of.
At the end of this period, however, the liberation of the Slavs from the Balkans
contributed to the national awakening of the Jews of Russia themselves. But the

818 V. Jabotinsky, O natsionalnom vospitanii (From the Education of National Sentiment), Sb.
Felietony (Collection of Serials). Saint Petersburg. Typography Herold, 1913, pp. 57.
819 JE*, t. 14, pp. 403404.
820 I.L. Klauzner, Literatura na ivril v Rossii (Literature in Modern Hebrew in Russia). BJWR,
p. 506.
pogroms of 18811882 caused the ideals of Haskala to collapse; The
conviction that civilisation was going to put an end to the persecutions of
another age against the Jews and that these, thanks to the Enlightenment, would
be able to approach the European peoples, this conviction was considerably
shaken.821 (The experience of the pogroms in the south of Ukraine is thus
extrapolated to all the Jews of Europe?) Among the Jews of Russia there
appeared the type of the repentant intellectual, of those who aspired to return
to traditional Judaism.822
It was then that Lev Pinsker, a wellknown doctor and publicist, already
sixty years of age, gave the Jews of Russia and Germany a vigorous appeal to
selfemancipation.823 Pinsker wrote that faith in emancipation had collapsed,
that it was now necessary to stifle every ounce of hope in brotherhood among
peoples. Today, the Jews do not constitute a living nation; they are strangers
everywhere; they endure oppression and contempt on the part of the peoples
who surround them. The Jewish people is the spectre of a dead wandering
among the living. One must be blind not to see that the Jews are the chosen
people of universal hatred. The Jews cannot assimilate to any nation and
consequently cannot be tolerated by any nation. By wanting to mingle with
other peoples, they have frivolously sacrificed their own nationality, but
nowhere have they obtained that the others recognise them as nativeborn
inhabitants equal to them. The destiny of the Jewish people cannot depend on
the benevolence of other peoples. The practical conclusion thus lies in the
creation of a people on its own territory. What is needed, therefore, is to find
an appropriate territory, no matter where, in what part of the world, 824 and that
the Jews come to populate it.
Moreover, the creation in 1860 of the Alliance [Israelite Universal] was
nothing but the first sign of Jewish refusal of a single optionassimilation.
There already existed among the Jews of Russia a movement of
Palestinophilia, the aspiration to return to Palestine. (Conforming, in essence,
to traditional religious salutation: Next year in Jerusalem.) This movement
gained momentum after 18811882. Stretching out its efforts to colonise
Palestine so that within a century the Jews can finally leave the inhospitable
land of Europe The slogans that the Enlightenment had previously
broadcasted, inciting to fight traditionalism, Hasidism and religious prejudices,
gave way to a call for reconciliation and the union of all layers of Jewish society
for the realisation of the ideals of Palestine, for the return to the Judaism of

821 JE, 1.12, p. 259.

822 Ibidem, t. 13, p. 639.
823 Title of his famous work.
824 Ibidem, t. 12, pp. 526527; Hessen*, t. 2, pp. 233234; G. Svet, Rousskiie evrei v sionizme
i v stroilelstve Palestiny i Izrailia (The Jews of Russia in Zionism and the Edification of
Palestine and Israel). BJWR-1 *, pp. 244245.
our fathers. In many cities of Russia, circles were formed, called circles of the
Lovers of ZionKhoveveiTsion.825826
And it was thus that an idea joined another to rectify it. Going to settle
elsewhere, yes, but not anywhere: in Palestine.
But what had happened in Palestine? The first crusade resulted in the
virtual disappearance of the few Hebrews who remained in Palestine.
Nevertheless, a tiny Jewish religious community had succeeded in surviving
and the collapse of the Crusader State, and the conquest of the country by the
Mamelukes, and the invasion by the Mongol hordes. Over the following
centuries, the Jewish population was somewhat replenished by a modest
migratory flow of believers from different countries. At the end of the
eighteenth century a certain number of Hasidim emigrated from Russia. In the
middle of the nineteenth century, there were twelve thousand Jews in Palestine,
whereas at the end of the eleventh century there were twentyfive thousand.
These Jewish towns in the land of Israel constituted what was called the
Yishuv. All their inhabitants (men) were only studying Judaism, and nothing
else. They lived on Halukasubsidies sent by Jewish communities in Europe.
These funds were distributed by the rabbis, hence the absolute authority of the
rabbis. The leaders of the Yishuv rejected any attempt to create in the country
even an embryo of productive work of Jewish origin. They were studying
exclusively the Talmud, nothing else, and on a fairly elementary level. The
great Jewish historian G. Gretz, who visited Palestine in 1872, found that
only a minority studied for real, the others preferred to stroll the streets,
remained idle, engaged in gossip and slander. He believed that this system
favours obscurantism, poverty and degeneration of the Jewish population of
Palestineand for this he himself had to undergo Herem827.828
In 1882, in Kharkov, Palestinophile students founded the Biluim circle.
They proposed to create in Palestine a model agricultural colony, to set the
tone to the general colonisation of Palestine by the Jews; they undertook to
found circles in several cities of Russia. (Later they created a first settlement in
Palestine, but were confronted to the hostility and opposition of the traditional
Yishuv: the rabbis demanded that, according to ancient custom, the cultivation
of the earth be suspended one year out of seven.829)
Pinsker supported the advocates of the return to Palestine: in 1887 he
summoned the first Congress of Palestinophiles in Katovice, then in
Druskeniki, and the second in 1887. Propagandists began to cover the Pale of

825 JE*, t. 12, pp. 259260.

826 A pioneering Zionist movement founded before Herzl.
827 Herem (Hebrew word): the status of one who is cut off from the community due to impurity
or consecration. The individual in state of Herem is an outlaw. A kind of excommunication.
828 M. Wartburg, Plata za sionism (The Wage of Zionism), in 22: Obschestvenno
politicianski i liieratournyi journal evreiskoi intelligenlsii iz SSSR V Izraile (22: politico
social and literary review of the Jewish intelligentsia emigrated from USSR to Israel), Tel
Aviv, 1987, No. 56, pp. 112114; Svet, SJE-1, pp. 235243.
829 JE, t. 4, pp. 577579; Warthurg, in 22, 1987, no. 56, p. 115.
Settlement, speaking in synagogues and public meetings. (Deutsch testifies that
after 1882 P. Axelrod himself contributed to palestinophilia830)
Of course, Smolenskin is one of the passionate apostles of the return to
Palestine: bubbling and lively, he connects with AngloJewish political actors,
but he comes up against the opposition of the Alliance, who does not want to
promote the colonisation of Palestine, but rather to direct the migratory wave
towards America. He then describes the tactics of the Alliance as betrayal of
the cause of the people. His premature death cut his efforts short.831
We note, however, that this movement towards Palestine was rather weakly
received by the Jews of Russia; it was even thwarted. The idea of a political
revival of the Jewish people brought a small handful of intellectuals behind it at
the time, and it soon came up against fierce adversaries. 832 The conservative
circles, the rabbinate and the Tzadikim833 saw in this current towards Palestine
an attack on the divine will, an attack on faith in the Messiah who alone must
bring the Jews back to Palestine. As for the progressive assimilationists, they
saw in this current a reactionary desire to isolate the Jews from the rest of
enlightened humanity.834
The Jews of Europe did not support the movement either.
Meanwhile, on site, the success of the return was revealed to be too
mitigated: many colonists discovered their incompetence in the work of the
land; the ideal of rebirth of the ancient country was crumbling into petty acts
of pure benevolence; The colonies survived only because of the subsidies sent
by Baron Rothschild. And in the early 1990s, colonisation went through a
serious crisis due to an anarchic system of land purchase and a decision by
Turkey (the owner of Palestine) to ban the Jews of Russia from disembarking in
Palestinian ports.835
It was at this time that the publicist, thinker and organiser Asher Ginzberg
became known, under the eloquent pseudonym of Ahad Haam (One of His
People). He strongly criticised practical palestinophilia as it had been
constituted; what he advocated was, before striving for a renaissance on a
territory, to worry about a rebirth of hearts, an intellectual and moral
improvement of the people: to install at the centre of Jewish life, a living and
spiritual aspiration, a desire for national cohesion, revival and free development
in a national spirit, but on the basis of all men. 836 This will later be called
spiritual Zionism (but not religious, and this is important).
That same year, 1889, in order to unite among them those who were dear to
the idea of a rebirth of national feeling, Ahad Haam founded a leagueor, as it

830 L. Deulsch, King evreiev v rousskom revolioutsionnom dvijenii (The role of the Jews in
The Russian revolutionary movement), t. 1, 2nd ed., ML., 1925, pp. 5, 161.
831 JE, t. 14, pp. 406407.
832 Hessen, t. 2, p. 234.
833 Tzadikim (Hebrew word): the righteous.
834 JE, t. 12, p. 261.
835 Ibidem, pp. 261262.
836 JE*, t. 3, pp. 480482.
is calledan order: BneMoshe837 (The sons of Moses), whose status
resembled strongly those of the Masonic lodges; the applicant made the
solemn promise of strictly executing all the demands of order; the new members
were initiated by a master, the big brother; the neophyte undertook to serve
without reserve the ideal of national rebirth, even if there was little hope that
this ideal would be realised any time soon.838 It was stipulated in the manifesto
of order that national consciousness takes precedence over religious
consciousness, personal interests are subject to national interests, and it was
recommended that a feeling of unreserved love for Judaism, placed above all
other objectives of the movement. Thus was prepared the ground for the
reception of political Zionism of Herzl 839 of which Ahad Haam absolutely
did not want.
He made several trips to Palestine: in 1891, 1893, and 1900. Regarding
colonisation, he denounced an anarchic character and an insufficient rootedness
in tradition.840 He severely criticised the dictatorial conduct of Baron
Rothschilds emissaries.841
This is how Zionism was born in Europe, a decade behind Russia. The first
leader of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, had been, until the age of thirtysix (he only
lived to fortyfour), a writer, a playwright, a journalist. He had never been
interested in Jewish history or, a fortiori, in the Hebrew language, and,
characteristically, as a good Austrian liberal, he considered the aspirations of the
various ethnic minorities of the AustroHungarian Empire to self
determination and national existence to be reactionary, and found it normal to
stifle them.842 As Stefan Zweig writes, Herzl cherished the dream of seeing the
Jews of Vienna enter the cathedral in order to be baptised and seeing the Jewish
question resolved once and for all by the fusion of Judaism and Christianity. But
antiJewish sentiments developed in AustriaHungary in parallel with the rise of
PanGermanism, while in Paris, where Herzl resided at the time, the Dreyfus
affair broke out. Herzl had the opportunity to witness the public degradation of
Captain Dreyfus; convinced of his innocence, he was deeply shaken and
changed his course. If separation is inevitable, he said, well, let it be radical!
If we suffer from being without a country, let us build ourselves a
homeland!843 Herzl then had a revelation: it was necessary to create a Jewish
state! As if struck by lightning, Herzl was enlightened by this new idea: anti
Semitism is not a fortuitous phenomenon subject to particular conditions, it is a
permanent evil, it is the eternal companion of the eternal errant, and the only

837 Association founded by Ahad Haam in Odessa.

838 Ibidem, t. 4, pp. 683684.
839 Svet, op. cit., pp. 250251.
840 JE, t. 3, p. 481.
841 SJE, t. 1, pp. 248249.
842 JE, t. 6, pp. 407409.
843 Stefan Zweig, Vtchrachnii mir. Vospominaniia evropeitsa (The world of yesterday:
Memories of a European), in 22, 1994, No. 92, pp. 215216.
possible solution to the Jewish question, is a sovereign Jewish state. 844 (To
conceive such a project after nearly two thousand years of diaspora, what
imaginative power one needed, what exceptional audacity!) However, according
to S. Zweig, Herzls pamphlet entitled A Jewish State received from the
Viennese bourgeoisie a welcome perplexed and irritated Whats gotten into
this writer, so intelligent, so cultivated and spiritual? Our language is German
and not Hebrew, our homelandbeautiful Austria, Herzl, does he not give
our worst enemies arguments against us: he wants to isolate us? Consequently,
Vienna abandoned him and laughed at him. But the answer came to him
from elsewhere; it burst forth like a thunderbolt, so sudden, charged with such a
weight of passion and such ecstasy that he was almost frightened to have
awakened, around the world, a movement with his dozens of pages, a
movement so powerful and through which he found himself overwhelmed. His
answer did not come to him, it is true, from the Jews of the West but from the
formidable masses of the East. Herzl, with his pamphlet, had inflamed this
nucleus of Judaism, which was smouldering under the ashes of the stranger.845
Henceforth, Herzl gives himself body and soul to his new idea. He breaks
off with those closest to him, he only frequents the Jewish people He who,
even recently, despised politics, now founds a political movement; he
introduces to it a spirit and a party discipline, forms the framework of a future
army and transforms the [Zionist] congresses into a true parliament of the
Jewish people. At the first Congress of Basel in 1897 he produced a very
strong impression on the Jews who were meeting for the first time in a
parliamentary role, and during his very first speech, he was unanimously and
enthusiastically proclaimed leader and chief of the Zionist movement. He
shows a consummate art to find the formulas of conciliation, and, conversely,
the one who criticises his objective or merely blames certain measures taken
by him, that one is the enemy not only of Zionism, but of the entire Jewish
people.846
The energetic writer Max Nordau (Suedfeld) supported him by expressing
the idea that emancipation is fallacious, since it has introduced seeds of discord
into the Jewish world: the emancipated Jew believes that he really has found a
homeland, when all that is living and vital in Judaism, which represents the
Jewish ideal, the courage and the ability to advance, all this is none other than
Zionism.847
At this 1st Congress, the delegates of Russian Zionism constituted one
third of the participants 66 out of 197. In the eyes of some, their presence
could be regarded as a gesture of opposition to the Russian government. To
Zionism had adhered all of the Russian KhoveveiTsion, thus contributing to
the establishment of global Zionism.848 Thus Zionism drew its strength from
844 JE, t. 6, p. 409.
845 Zweig, in 22, op. cil., pp. 216217.
846 JE, t. 6, pp. 410411.
847 JE, 1.11, pp. 788792.
848 SJE, t. 7, p. 940.
the communities of oppressed Jews in the East, having found only limited
support among the Jews of Western Europe.849 But it also followed that the
Russian Zionists represented for Herzl a most serious opposition. Ahad Haam
waged a fierce struggle against Herzls political Zionism (alongside the majority
of the palestinophiles), strongly criticising the pragmatism of Herzl and Nordau,
and denouncing what he called their indifference to the spiritual values of
Judaic culture and tradition.850 He found chimeric the hope of political Zionism
to found an autonomous Jewish state in the near future; he regarded all this
movement as extremely detrimental to the cause of the spiritual rebirth of the
nation They do not care about the salvation of Judaism in perdition because
they care nothing about spiritual and cultural heritage; they aspire not to the
rebirth of the ancient nation, but to the creation of a new people from the
dispersed particles of ancient matter.851 (If he uses and even emphasises the
word Judaism, it is almost evident that it is not in the sense of the Judaic
religion, but in the sense of the spiritual system inherited from ancestors. The
Jewish Encyclopdia tells us about Ahad Haam that in the 70s, he was more
and more imbued with rationalism and deviated from religion. 852 If the only
vocation for Palestine is to become the spiritual centre that could unite, by
national and spiritual ties, the dispersed nations,853 a centre which would pour
out its light on the Jews of the whole world, would create a new spiritual
bond between the scattered members of the people, it would be less a State of
the Jews than an elite spiritual community.854
Discussions agitated the Zionists. Ahad Haam strongly criticised Herzl
whom Nordau supported by accusing Ahad Haam of covert Zionist. World
Zionist congresses were held every year; in 1902 took place the one of the
Russian Zionists in Minsk, and the discussions resumed. This is where Ahad
Haam read his famous exposition: A spiritual rebirth.855
Zionism no longer met with amenity from the outside. Herzl expected this:
as soon as the program of the Zionists would take a concrete form and as soon
as the real departure to Palestine began, antiSemitism everywhere would end.
But long before this result was reached, stronger than others, the voice of those
who feared that the taking of a public position in the nationalist sense of an
assimilated Jew would give antisemites the opportunity to say that every
assimilated Jew hides under his mask an authentic Jew incapable of blending
into the local population.856 And as soon as an independent state was created,
the Jews went everywhere to be suspected and accused of civic disloyalty,

849 J. Parks, Evrei sredi narodov: Obzor pritchin antisemitima (The Jews among Peoples: An
Overview of the Causes of AntiSemitism), Paris, YMCA Press, 1932, p. 45.
850 SJE, t. 1, p. 249.
851 JE, t. 3, p. 482.
852 SJE, I. 1, p. 248.
853 JE, 1.12, p. 262.
854 Wartburg, in 22, 1987, no. 56, pp. 116117.
855 JE, t. 3, p. 482.
856 Ibidem, t. 6, p. 409.
ideological isolationismwhich their enemies had always suspected and
accused them of.
In reply, at the Second Zionist Congress (1898), Nordau declared: We
reject with disdain the name of party; the Zionists are not a party, they are the
Jewish people themselves Those who, on the contrary, are at ease in servitude
and contempt, they keep themselves carefully apart, unless they fight us
fiercely.857
As one English historian observes: Yes, Zionism has done a great service
to the Jews by restoring them a sense of dignity, and yet it leaves unresolved
the question of their attitude towards the countries in which they live.858
In Austria, a compatriot of Herzl, Otto Weininger, argued with him:
Zionism and Judaism are incompatible with the fact that Zionism intends to
force the Jews to take upon themselves the responsibility of a state of their own,
which contradicts the very essence of every Jew.859 And he predicted the failure
of Zionism.
In Russia in 1899, I. M. Biekerman argued strongly against Zionism, as an
idea deemed quacky, inspired by antiSemitism, of reactionary inspiration and
harmful by nature; it is necessary to reject the illusions of the Zionists and,
without in any way renouncing the spiritual particularism of the Jews, struggle
hand in hand with the cultural and progressive forces of Russia in the name of
the regeneration of the common fatherland.860
At the beginning of the century, the poet N. Minsky had issued this
criticism: Zionism marks the loss of the notion of universal man, it lowers the
cosmopolitan dimensions, the universal vocation of Judaism to the level of an
ordinary nationalism. The Zionists, speaking tirelessly of nationalism, turn
away from the genuinely national face of Judaism and in fact seek only to be
like everyone else, not worse than others.861
It is interesting to compare these sentences with the remark made before the
revolution by the orthodox thinker S. Bulgakov: The biggest difficulty for
Zionism is that it is not able to recover the lost faith of the fathers, and it is
obliged to rely on a principle that is either national, cultural or ethnic, a
principle on which no genuine great nation can rely exclusively.862
But the first Russian Zionistsnow, it is from Russia that most of the
founders of the State of Israel and the pioneers of the State of Israel came
out,863 and it was in Russian that were written the best pages of Zionist
857 Ibidem*, t. 11, p. 792.
858 Parks, p. 186.
859 N. Goulina, Kto boilsa Otto Veiningcra? (Whos afraid of Otto Weininger?). In 22*, 1983,
No. 31, p. 206.
860 JE, t. 4, p. 556.
861 N. Minsky, Natsionalnyi lik i patriotism (The National Face and Patriotism), Slovo, Saint
Petersburg, 1909, 28 March (10 April), p. 2.
862 Prou S. Bulgakov, Khristianstvo i evreiskij vopros (Christianity and the Jewish Question),
Paris. YMCA Press, 1991, p. 11.
863 F. Kolker, Novyj plan pomoschi sovietskomou cvrcistvou (A new plan for aid to the Jews of
Russia), in 22, 1983, No. 31, p. 149.
journalism864were filled with an irrepressible enthusiasm for the idea of
returning to their people the lost homeland, the ancient land of the Bible and
their ancestors, to create a State of unparalleled quality and to have men of
exceptional quality grow there.
And this impulse, this call addressed to all to turn to physical work, the
work of the earth!Does not this appeal echo the exhortations of a Tolstoy, the
doctrine of asceticism?865
All streams lead to the sea.

But, in the final analysis, how can a Zionist behave towards the country in
which he resides for the time being?
For the Russian Zionists who devoted all their strength to the Palestinian
dream, it was necessary to exclude themselves from the affairs that agitated
Russia as such. Their statutes stipulated: Do not engage in politics, neither
internal nor external. They could only weakly, without conviction, take part in
the struggle for equal rights in Russia. As for participating in the national
liberation movement?but that would be pulling the chestnuts out of the fire
for the others!866
Such tactics drew Jabotinskys fiery reproaches: Even passing travellers
have an interest in the inn being clean and tidy.867
And then, in what language should the Zionists display their propaganda?
They did not know Hebrew, and, anyway, who would have understood it?
Consequently: either in Russian or in Yiddish. And this brought closer once
more the radicals of Russia868 and the Jewish revolutionaries.
Evidently, the Jewish revolutionary youth jousted with the Zionists: no and
no! The solution of the Jewish question does not lie in the departure out of
Russia, it is in the political fight for equal rights here! Instead of going to settle
far beyond the seas, we must make use of the possibility of affirming ourselves
here in this country. And their arguments could not avoid shaking more than one
by their clarity.
In the Bolshevik circles, the Zionists were denounced as reactionary; they
were treated as the party of the darkest, most desperate pessimism.869
864 N. Goulina, V poiskakh outratchennoi samoidenlilikatsii (In Search of the Lost Self
Identity), in 22, 1983, No. 29, p. 216.
865 Amos Oz, Spischaia krasaviisa: griozy i pruboujdeniia (Sleeping Beauty: dreams and
awakening), in 22, 1985, No. 42. p. 117
866 G. J. laronson, V borbe za granjdanskiie i nalsionalnyie prava: Obschestvennyie tetcheniia v
rousskom evreistve (In the fight for civil and national rights: the social currents among the
Jews of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 218219.
867 Ibidem*, p. 219.
868 Ibidem pp. 219220.
869 S. Dimanstein. Revolioulsionnyie dvijeniia sredi evreiev (The revolution among the Jews),
Sb. 1905: Istoriia revolioutsionnogo dvijeniia v otdclnykh otcherkakh (Collection 1905:
History of the revolutionary movement in separate essays), directed by N. Pokrovsky, vol. 3,
 Inevitably, intermediate currents were to emerge. Thus the Zionist party of
the left PoaleiTsion (Workers of Zion). It was in Russia that it was founded
in 1899; it combined socialist ideology with political Zionism. It was an
attempt to find a median line between those concerned exclusively with class
problems and those concerned only with national problems. Profound
disagreements existed within PoaleiTsion on the question of participation in
revolutionary action in Russia.870 (And the revolutionaries themselves were
divided, some leaning towards the SocialDemocrats, others towards the Social
Revolutionaries.)
Other TseireiTsion groups, ideologically close to nonMarxist socialist
Zionism, began to form from 1905 onwards.871 In 1904, a split within Poalei
Tsion gave birth to a new party, the Socialist Zionists, breaking with the ideal
of Palestine: the extension of Yiddish as a spoken language to all Jewish
masses, that is quite sufficient, and we scorn the idea of national autonomy!
Zionism begins to take on a bourgeois and reactionary tint. What is needed is to
create from it a socialist movement, to awaken revolutionary political instincts
in the Jewish masses. The party strongly supported the social and economic
content of Zionism, but denied the need to revive the land of Judea, culture,
Hebrew traditions. Granted, Jewish emigration is too chaotic, it must be
oriented towards a specific territory, but there is no essential link between
Zionism and Palestine. The Hebrew state must be based on socialist and non
capitalist foundations. Such an emigration is a longterm historical process; the
bulk of the Jewish masses will remain well into the future in their current places
of residence. The party has approved the participation of the Jews in the
political struggle in Russia872that is to say, in the struggle for their rights in
this country. As for Judaism and faith, they despised them.
All this mishmash had to generate a socialist Jewish group called
Renaissance, which believed that the national factor is progressive by
nature, and in 1906 the members of this group who had broken with the
Zionists Socialist Party constituted the Soviet Socialist Workers Party, the
SERP. (They were called serpoviys or seymovtsy, for they demanded the
election of a Jewish national SejmSeimintended to be the supreme organ
of Jewish national selfgovernment.873) For them, Russian and Hebrew were, in
their capacity of languages of use, equal. And by advocating autonomism
within the Russian state, the SERP, socialist, was distinguished from the Bund,
also socialist.874
In spite of the disagreements that divided the Zionists among themselves, a
general shift of Zionism towards socialism took place in Russia, which attracted
the attention of the Russian government. Until then, it had not interfered with
book 1, M.L., 1927, pp. 107, 116.
870 SJE, t. 6, p. 551.
871 Ibidem, t. 7, p. 941.
872 Ibidem*, pp. 10211022.
873 Aronson, SJE-1, pp. 226229.
874 SJE, 1.1, p. 705, t. 7, p. 1021.
Zionist propaganda, but in 1903 Interior Minister Plehve addressed the
governors of the provinces and to the mayors of the big cities a bulletin stating
that the Zionists had relegated to the background the idea of leaving Palestine
and had concentrated on the organisation of Jewish life in their places of
residence, that such direction could not be tolerated and that consequently any
public propaganda in favour of Zionism would now be prohibited, as well as
meetings, conferences, etc.875
Made aware of this, Herzl (who had already solicited an audience with
Nicholas II in 1899) went immediately to Saint Petersburg to ask to be received
by Plehve. (It was just after the Kichinev pogrom, which occurred in the spring,
of which Plehve had been strongly accusedand which had therefore attracted
him the blame and invectives of the Russian Zionists)
Plehve made Herzl understand (according to the latters notes) that the
Jewish question for Russia is grave, if not vital, and we endeavour to solve it
correctly the Russian State wishes to have a homogeneous population, and it
demands a patriotic attitude from all We want to assimilate [the Jews], but
assimilation is slow I am not the enemy of the Jews. I know them well, I
spent my youth in Warsaw and, as a child, I always played with Jewish children.
I would very much like to do something for them. I do not want to deny that the
situation of the Jews of Russia is not a happy one. If I were a Jew, I, too, would
probably be an opponent of the government. The formation of a Jewish State
[accommodating] several million immigrants would be extremely desirable for
us. That does not mean, however, that we want to lose all our Jewish citizens.
Educated and wealthy people, we would gladly keep them. The destitute
without education, we would gladly let them go. We had nothing against
Zionism as long as it preached emigration, but now we note great changes 876
in its goals. The Russian government sees with a kindly eye the immigration of
Zionists to Palestine, and if the Zionists return to their initial plans, they are
ready to support them in the face of the Ottoman Empire. But it cannot tolerate
the propagation of Zionism, which advocates a separatism of national
inspiration within Russia itself877: this would entail the formation of a group of
citizens to whom patriotism, which is the very foundation of the State, would be
foreign. (According to N. D. Lyubimov, who was then director of the ministers
cabinet, Plehve told him that Herzl, during the interview, had recognised that
Western bankers were helping the revolutionary parties of Russia. Sliosberg,
however, thinks this is unlikely.878)
Plehve made his report to the Emperor, the report was approved, and Herzl
received a letter of confirmation in the same vein.
He felt that his visit to Plehve had been a success.
875 S. Ginzburg, Poezdka Teodora Gertzla v Petersburg (Theodor Herzls trip to Saint
Petersburg), JW, New York, Union of Russian Jews in New York, 1944, p. 199.
876 Ibidem*, pp. 202203.
877 SJE, t. 6, p. 533.
878 G. B. Sliosberg, Dela minouvehikh dnei: Zapiski ruskogo evreia (Notes of a Jew of Russia)
in 3 vols., Paris, 19331934, t. 2, p. 301
 Neither of them suspected that they had only eleven months left to live
Turkey had no intention of making any concessions to the Zionists, and the
British Government, in that same year of 1905, proposed that not Palestine, but
Uganda, be colonised.
In August 1903, at the Sixth Congress of the Zionists in Basel, Herzl was
the spokesperson for this variant which, of course, is not Zion, but which
could be accepted on a provisional basis, in order for a Jewish state to be
created as quickly as possible.879
This project provoked stormy debates. It seems that it met with some
support, in the Yishuv, for new immigrants, discouraged by the harsh living
conditions in Palestine. The Russian Zionistswho claimed to have more than
all the need to quickly find a refugefiercely opposed the project. Headed by
M. M. Oussychkine (founder of the Biluim group and, later, the righthand man
of Ahad Haam in the BneMoshe League), they recalled that Zionism was
inseparable from Zion and that nothing could replace it!880
Congress nevertheless constituted a commission to travel to Uganda to
study the land.881 The Seventh Congress, in 1905, heard its report, and the
Ugandan variant was rejected.882 Overcome by all these obstacles, Herzl
succumbed to a heart attack before he knew the final decision.883
But this new dilemma provoked a new rupture in Zionism: they split the so
called territorialists, led by Israel Zangwill, to which joined the English
delegates. They established their International Council; the latter held its
meetings, receiving subsidies from Jacob Schiffe and Baron Rothschild. They
had given up demanding Palestine and nothing else. Yes, it was necessary to
carry out a mass colonisation by the Jews, but wherever it was. Year after year,
in their research, they reviewed a dozen countries. They almost selected Angola,
but Portugal is too weak, it will not be able to defend the Jews, and therefore
the Jews risk becoming the victims of the neighbouring tribes.884
They were even ready to accept territory within Russia even if they could
create an autonomous entity with an independent administration.
This argument: a strong country must be able to defend immigrants on the
premises of their new residence, reinforced those who insisted on the need to
quickly establish an independent state capable of hosting mass immigration.
This was suggestedand would suggest laterMax Nordau when he said that
he was not afraid of the economic unpreparedness of the country [that is, of
Palestine] for the reception of newcomers.885 However, for this, it was
necessary to be get the better of Turkey, and also find a solution to the Arab
problem. The adherents of this program understood that, in order to implement

879 JE*, t. 6, p. 412.

880 Ibidem, t. 15, p. 135.
881 Ibidem, t. 3, p. 679.
882 Ibidem, pp. 680681.
883 JE, t. 6, p. 407.
884 Ibidem, t. 14, pp. 827829.
885 SJE, t. 7, pp. 861892.
it, it was necessary to have recourse to the assistance of powerful allies. Now
this assistance, no country, for the moment, proposed it.
To arrive at the creation of the State of Israel, we must go through two
more world wars.
 Chapter 8. At the Turn of the 20th Century

It appears that after six years of reflection and hesitation, the Tsar Alexander III
irrevocably chose, as of 1887, to contain the Jews of Russia by restrictions of a
civil and political nature, and he held this position until his death.
The reasons were probably, on the one hand, the evident part played by the
Jews in the revolutionary movement, on the other, the no less evident fact that
many Jewish youths shunned military service: only three quarters of those who
should have been enrolled served in the army.886 One noticed the ever
increasing number of Jews who did not respond to the appeal, as well as the
increasing amount of unpaid fines related to these absences: only 3 million
rubles out of 30 million were returned annually to the funds of the State. (In
fact, the government still had no accurate statistics on the Jewish population, its
birth rate, its mortality rate before the age of 21. Let us remind that in 1876 [see
Chapter 4], because of this absenteeism, there had been a restriction of the
favour accorded to certain persons by virtue of their family situationwhich
meant that the only sons of Jewish families were now subjected, like the others,
to general conscription, and as a result the proportion of Jewish conscripts had
become greater than that of nonJews. This situation was not corrected until the
early 1900s under Nicolas II.887)
As far as public education was concerned, the tsars wish, which he had
formulated in 1885, was that the number of Jews admitted to institutions
outside the Pale of Settlement was in the same ratio as the number of Jews in
the total population. But the authorities pursued two aims simultaneously: not
only to slow down the growing flow of Jews towards education, but also to fight
against the revolution, to make the school, as it was called, not a pool of
revolutionaries, but a breeding ground for science.888 In the chancelleries, they
were preparing a more radical measure which consisted of prohibiting access to
education to elements likely to serve the revolutiona measure contrary to the
spirit of Lomonosov889 and profoundly vicious, prejudicial to the State itself: it
886 J. Larine, Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR (The Jews and antiSemitism in the USSR), M.L.,
1929, p. 140.
887 G.V. Sliosberg, Diela minouvchikh dniei: Zapiski ruskogo evreia (Notes of a Jew of Russia),
3 vols., Paris, 19331934, vol. 2, pp. 206209.
888 Hessen, t. 2, p. 231.
889 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (17111765): great scholar and Russian poet,
representative of the Enlightenment in Russia. Of modest origin, he is the prototype of the
genius born into the people. The University of Moscow bears his name.
was to deny the children of disadvantaged strata of the general population (the
sons of cooks) admission to colleges. The formulation, falsely reasonable,
falsely decent, was: Leave the school principals free to accept only children
who are in the care of persons who can guarantee them good supervision at
home and provide them with all that is necessary for the pursuit of their
studiesfurthermore, in higher education establishments, it was planned to
increase the right of access to classes.890
This measure provoked a strong outrage in liberal circles, but less violent
and less lasting than the one that was instigated in 1887 by a new measure: the
reduction of the number of Jews admitted to high schools and universities. It
was originally planned to publish these two provisions within the framework of
the same law. But the Council of Ministers opposed it, arguing that the
publication of a general decision accompanied by restrictions for the Jews could
be misinterpreted. In June 1887, therefore, only a part was promulgated, the
one that concerned nonJews: Measures aiming to regulate the contingent of
pupils in secondary and higher educationmeasures directed in fact against
the common people As for the reduction of the quota of the Jews, it was
entrusted to the Minister of Education, Delianov, who implemented it in July
1887 by a bulletin addressed to the rectors of school boards. He fixed for the
secondary and higher schools the numerus clausus of the Jews at 10% for the
Pale of Settlement, 5% outside it, and 3% in the two capitals.
Following the example of the Ministry of Public Instruction, other
organisations began to introduce quotas of admission into their institutions,
and some were closed down to the Jews. (Such as the Higher School of
Electricity, the Saint Petersburg School of Communication, and, most strikingly,
the Academy of Military Medicine which temporarily prohibited, but for many
years, its access to Jews.891)
This numerus clausus law, which had not been established during the
ninetythree years of massive presence of Jews in Russia and which was to
continue for twentynine years (practically until 1916) struck the Jewish society
of Russia all the more painfully because in the years 18701880 there had been
a remarkable impulse of the Jews to enter schools and colleges, a
phenomenon which Sliosberg in particular explains is not due to the realisation
of the masses of the necessity of education but rather due to the fact that, for
a Jew without capital, figuring out how to deploy ones forces in the economic
field was very difficult, and due to the fact that conscription became compulsory
for all, but that there were dispensations for the students. Thus, if only wellto
do Jewish youth had studied before, a Jewish student proletariat was now
being created; if among the Russians, now as in the past, it was the favoured
social classes that received higher education, among the Jews, in addition to the
wealthy, young people from the underprivileged classes began to study.892

890 JE*, t. 13, p. 52.

891 Ibidem, t. 13, pp. 5253.
892 Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 92; t. 2, p. 89.
 We would like to add that in those years there had been a turningpoint in
the whole world and in all fields of culture, towards a no longer elitist but
generalised educationand the Jews, particularly intuitive and receptive, had
been the first to feel it, at least instinctively. But how can we find a way to
satisfy, without causing friction, without clashes, the constant and increasing
aspiration of the Jews to education? In view of the fact that the indigenous
population, in its mass, remained fairly asleep and backward, how to avoid
prejudice to the development of either side?
Of course, the objective of the Russian government was the struggle against
the revolution, for among the student youth many Jews had been noticed by
their activism and their total rejection of the regime in place. However, when
we know the enormous influence exerted by Pobedonostsev 893 during the reign
of Alexander III, it must be admitted that the aim was also to defend the Russian
nation against the imbalance that was to occur in the field of education. This is
what testifies the Baron Morits von Hirsch, a big Jewish banker who visited
Russia and to whom Pobedonostsev expressed his point of view: the policy of
the government is inspired not by the idea that the Jews are a threat, but by
the fact that, rich in their multimillennial culture, they are more spiritually and
intellectually powerful than the still ignorant and unpolished Russian people
that is why measures had to be taken to balance the low capacity of the local
population to resist. (And Pobedonostsev asked Hirsch, known for his
philanthropy, to promote the education of the Russian people in order to realise
the equal rights of the Jews of Russia. According to Sliosberg, Baron Hirsch
allocated one million rubles to private schools.894)
Like any historical phenomenon, this measure can be viewed from various
angles, particularly from the two different angles that follow.
For a young Jewish student, the most elementary fairness seemed flouted:
he had shown capacities, application, he had to be admitted But he was not!
Obviously, for these gifted and dynamic young people, to encounter such a
barrier was more than mortifying; the brutality of such a measure made them
indignant. Those who had hitherto been confined to the trades of commerce and
handicrafts were now prevented from accessing ardently desired studies that
would lead to a better life.
Conversely, the native population did not see in these quotas a breach of
the principle of equality, on the contrary, even. The institutions in question were
financed by the public treasury, and therefore by the whole population, and if
the Jews were more numerous, it meant that it was at the expense of all; and it
was known that, later on, educated people would enjoy a privileged position in
society. And the other ethnic groups, did they also have to have a proportional
representation within the educated layer? Unlike all the other peoples of the

893 Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (18271907) Statesman, member of the Council of the
Empire since 1872, attorney general of the Holy Synod, preceptor of Nicholas II. Exercised
great influence over Alexander III.
894 Ibidem, t. 2, p. 33.
empire, the Jews now aspired almost exclusively to education, and in some
places this could mean that the Jewish contingent in schools exceeded 50%. The
numerus clausus was unquestionably instituted to protect the interests of
Russians and ethnic minorities, certainly not to bully the Jews. (In the 20s of the
twentieth century, a similar approach was sought in the United States to limit
the Jewish contingent in universities, and immigration quotas were also
establishedbut we shall come back to this. Moreover, the matter of quotas,
put today in terms of no less than895, has become a burning issue in America.)
In practice, there have been many exceptions to the application of the
numerus clausus in Russia. The first to avoid it were girls high schools: In
most high schools for young girls, the quotas were not current, nor in several
public higher education establishments: the conservatories of Saint Petersburg
and Moscow, the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of Moscow, the
Kiev School of Commerce, etc.896 A fortiori quotas were not applied in any
private establishment; and these were numerous and of high quality.897 (For
example, at the Kirpitchnikova High School, one of the best high schools in
Moscow, a quarter of the students were Jewish. 898 They were numerous at the
famous Polivanovskaya high school in Moscow, and the Androyeva girls
school in Rostov, where my mother was a pupil, there were in her class more
than half of Jewish girls.) Business schools (under the Ministry of Finance), to
which Jewish children were eager to register, were initially opened to them
without any restrictions, and those which took place after 1895 were relatively
light (for example: in commercial schools in the Pale of Settlement, financed
out of private funds, the number of Jews admitted depended on the amount of
money allocated by Jewish merchants for the maintenance of these schools, and
in many of them the percentage of Jewish students was 50% or more).
If the official standard was strictly observed at the time of admission to the
secondary classes, it was often largely overstepped in the larger classes.
Sliosberg explains this notably by the fact that the Jewish children who entered
high school pursued it to the end, whereas the nonJews often gave up their
studies before completion. This is why, in large classes, there were often much
more than 10% Jewish pupils.899 He confirmed that they were numerous, for
example, at the Poltava high school. Out of 80 boys, eight were Jewish. 900 In the
boys schools of Mariupol, at the time when there was already a local Duma,
about 14 to 15% of the pupils were Jewish, and in girls high schools, the

895 An allusion to the affirmative action setting minimum allowances for the admission of
ethnic minorities to the United States.
896 SJE, t. 6, p. 854.
897 I. M. Troitsky, Evrei v rousskoi chkole (The Jews in the Russian School), BJWR-1, p. 359.
898 P. D. Ilinsky, Vospominaniya (Memoires), Bibliotekafund Ruskie Zarubejnie (Library
and Archives), Russian Emigration (BFER), collection 1, A-90, p. 2.
899 Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 90.
900 N. V. VolkovMouromtsev, Iounost. Ot Viazmy do Feodosii (Youth, From Viazma to
Feodosiia), 2nd ed., M., Rousski Pout, Graal, 1997, p. 101.
proportion was even higher.901 In Odessa, where Jews constituted onethird of
the population,902 they were in 1894, 14% in the prestigious Richelieu high
school, more than 10% in the gymnasium No. 2, 37% in gymnasium No. 3; in
girls high schools the proportion was of 40%; in business schools, 72%, and in
university, 19%.903
To the extent that financial means permitted it, no obstacle prevented this
thirst for education. In a number of secondary schools in the central Russian
provinces there were few Jewish pupils at that time, and parents took the
opportunity to send their children there The wealthiest parents had their
children home schooled: they prepared for examinations to enter the next grade
and thus reached this way the senior year.904 In the period between 1887 and
1909, Jewish children were free to pass the schoolleaving examinations, and
they graduated as equals those who had followed the curriculum. 905 The
majority of external pupils were Jewish. A family like that of Jacob Marchak
(a jeweller with no great fortune, the father of the poet 906), whose five children
had a higher education, was not uncommon before the revolution.
Moreover, private establishments were opened everywhere, whether
mixed for the Jews and Christians, or for the Jews only Some of these
establishments enjoyed the same rights as public establishments; the others
were authorised to issue certificates entitling them to enrol in higher educational
establishments.907 A network of private Jewish settlements was established,
which formed the basis of a nationaltype education,908 The Jews were also
oriented towards higher education establishments abroad: a large part of them,
on their return to Russia, passed examinations before the State
Commissions.909 Sliosberg himself observed that in the 80s, at the University
of Heidelberg that the majority of Russian listeners were Jews and that some,
among them, did not have their bachelors degree.910
One can rightly wonder whether the restrictions, dictated by fear in front of
the revolutionary moods of the students, did not contribute to feeding said
moods. If these were not aggravated by indignation at the numerus clausus, and
by contacts maintained abroad with political emigrants.
What happened in Russian universities after the publication of the bulletin?
There was no sharp fall, but the number of Jews decreased almost every year,
from 13.8% in 1893 to 7% in 1902. The proportion of Jews studying at the

901 I. E. Temirov, Vospominaniia (Memoires). BFER, collection 1, A-29, p. 24.

902 JE, t. 12, p. 58.
903 A. Lvov, Novaia gazeta, New York, 511 Sept. 1981, No. 70, p. 26.
904 JE, t. 13, pp. 5455.
905 Ibidem, t. 16, p. 205.
906 Samufi Yakovlevich Marchak (18871964) Russian man of letters of the Soviet era.
907 Ibidem, t. 13, p. 55.
908 SJE, t. 6, p. 854.
909 JE, t. 13, p. 55.
910 Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 161.
universities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow remained no less than the imposed
3% norm throughout the period of validity of the said standard.911
Minister Delianov acceded more than once to the requests submitted to
him, and authorised admission to university beyond the numerus clausus.912
This was how hundreds of students were admitted. (Delianovs flexibility will
succeed later the rigidity of Minister Bogolepovand it is not excluded that
this may have contributed to making him the target of terrorists 913.914) Sliosberg
gives this overview: the percentage in the superior courts of medicine for
women outweighed that of the Academy of Military Medicine and that of the
university, and all the Jewish girls of the empire poured in. Several hundred
Jews were enrolled at the School of Psychoneuropathology in Saint Petersburg,
where they could enter without a baccalaureate, and so they were thousands
over the years. It was called the School of Neuropathology, but it also housed a
faculty of law. The Imperial Conservatory of Saint Petersburg was filled with
Jewish students of both sexes. In 1911, a private mining school opened in
Ekaterinoslav.915
Admission to specialised schools, such as that of health officers, was done
with great freedom. J. Teitel says that at the Saratov school of nurses (of high
quality, very well equipped) Jews from the Pale of Settlement were admitted
without any limitationand without prior authorisation issued by the police for
the displacement. Those who were admitted thus received full rights. This
practice was confirmed by the governor of Saratov at that time, Stolypin. Thus
the proportion of Jewish students could rise to 70%. In the other technical
colleges of Saratov, Jews from the Pale of Settlement were admitted without
any norm, and many of them continued their studies in higher education
From the Pale of Settlement also came a mass of external pupils that did not
find their place in university, and for whom the Jewish community of the city
struggled to find work.916
To all this it should be added that the number of establishments where the
teaching was delivered in Hebrew was not limited. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century there were 25,000 primary schools (Heder) with 363,000
pupils in the Pale of Settlement (64% of all Jewish children).917 It is true that in
1883 the old Jewish establishments of the State were closed due to having no

911 S. V. Pozner, Evrei v obschei chkole K istorii zakonodatelstva i pravitelstvennoi politiki v

oblasti evreiskogo voprosa (The Jews in the Common School. For the History of the
Legislation and State Policy in the Field of the Jewish Question), Saint Petersburg, Razum,
1914, pp. 5455.
912 Cf. Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 93.
913 Nikolai Pavlovich Bogolepov (18471901) lawyer, Minister of National Education.
Mortally wounded in the attack perpetrated by P. Karpovitch.
914 A. Goldenweiser, Pravovoie polojeniie evreiev v rossii (The legal situation of Jews in
Russia), LMJR-1, p. 149.
915 Sliosberg, t. 1, pp. 127128; t. 3, pp. 290292, 301.
916 J. L. Teitel, lz moiei jizni za 40 let (Stories of my life over forty years), Paris, J. Povolotsky
and Co, 1925, pp. 170176.
917 J. M. Troitsky, Evrei v rousskoi chkole (The Jews in the Russian School), op. cit., p. 358.
use: no one went there any more. (But note: the opening of these institutions
was once interpreted by the Jewish publicists as an act and a ruse of the
adverse reaction, and today their closure was also the act of adverse
reaction!)
In summary: the admission quotas did not hinder the Jews aspiration to
education. Nor did they contribute to raising the educational level of the non
Jewish peoples of the empire; they only aroused bitterness and rage among the
Jewish youth. But this, in spite of the prohibitions, was going to constitute an
intelligentsia of vanguard. It was the immigrants from Russia who formed the
nucleus of the first intellectual elite of the future State of Israel. (How many
times do we read in the Russian Jewish Encyclopdia the notices son of small
craftsman, son of small trader, son of merchant, and, further on,
completed university?)
The university diploma initially conferred the right to reside throughout the
empire and to serve in the administration (later, access to education in
academies, universities and public schools was once again limited). Graduates
of the Faculty of Medicinedoctors and pharmacistswere allowed to reside
anywhere, whether they practised their profession or not, and like all those
who had completed a higher degree, they could even devote themselves to
commerce or other trades, be members of the merchant corps without having
previously spent five years in the first guild in the Pale of Settlement as was
required of other merchants. The Jews holding the title of Doctor of Medicine
could practice their profession in any district of the empire, hire a medical
secretary and two aides among their coreligionists by bringing them from the
Pale of Settlement. The right to reside in any place, as well as the right to trade,
was attributed to all those who practised paramedical professions without
having completed a higher educationdentists, nurses, midwives. As from
1903, a requirement was added: that these persons should mandatorily practise
their field of specialisation.918

Restrictions also affected the bar, the independent body of lawyers set up in
1864. This profession paved the way for a successful career, both financially
and personally, and to convey ones ideas: advocacy by lawyers in court were
not subject to any censorship, they were published in the press, so that the
speakers enjoyed greater freedom of expression than the newspapers
themselves. They exploited it widely for social criticism and for the
edification of society. The class of solicitors had transformed themselves in a
quarter of a century into a powerful force of opposition: one should remember
the triumphal acquittal of Vera Zasulich in 1878.919 (The moral laxity of the

918 JE, t. 10, pp. 780781.

919 Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (18491919): revolutionary populist linked to Netchayev. Shot at
the commander of the Saint Petersburg plaza (1873). Acquitted. Having become a Marxist,
lawyers argumentation at the time strongly worried Dostoevsky: he explained it
in his writings.920) Within this influential brotherhood, the Jews quickly
occupied a preponderant place, revealing themselves to be the most gifted of all.
When, in 1889, the Council of the Sworn Attorneys of Saint Petersburg
published for the first time in its report the data concerning the number of Jews
in this trade, the great Saint Petersburg lawyer A. J. Passover renounced the
title of member of the Council and was no longer a candidate for election.921
In the same year 1889, the Minister of Justice, Manasseine, presented a
report to Tsar Alexander III; it was stated that the bar is invaded by the Jews,
who supplant the Russians; they apply their own methods and violate the code
of ethics to which swornin attorneys must obey. (The document does not
provide any clarification.922) In November 1889, on the orders of the tsar, a
provision was made, supposedly provisionally (and consequently able to escape
the legal procedure), requiring that the admission to the numbers of those
avowed and delegated authorities of nonChristian confession will be
henceforth, and until promulgation of a special law on the subject, possible only
with the authorisation of the Minister of Justice.923 But as apparently neither
the Moslems nor the Buddhists availed themselves in large numbers of the title
of lawyer, this provision proved to be de facto directed against the Jews.
From that year onwards, and for another fifteen years, practically no
unbaptised Jew received this authorisation from the minister, not even such
brilliant personalitiesand future great advocatesas M. M. Winaver 924 or O.
O. Gruzenberg: they remained confined for a decade and a half in the role of
law clerks. (Winaver even pleaded more than once in the Senate, and was
very much listened to.) The clerks in fact pleaded with the same freedom and
success as the attorneys themselves: here, there were no restrictions.925
In 1894, the new Minister of Justice, N. V. Muraviev, wanted to give this
temporary prohibition the value of permanent law. His argument was as follows:
The real danger is not the presence in the body of lawyers of a certain number
of people of Jewish faith who have rejected to a large extent the notions
contrary to the Christian norms which pertain to their nation, but it is in the fact
that the number of such persons becomes so great that they are likely to acquire
a preponderant importance and to exert an adverse influence on the general
level of morality and on the activities of that corporation.926 In the bill, it was
advocated that the proportion of nonChristian solicitors be limited in each
she was one of the leaders of the Menshevik party.
920 In the Journal of a writer for the month of February 1876.
921 JE, t. 6, p. 118.
922 S. L. Kutcherov, Evrei v rousskoi advokatoure (The Jews in the Russian Bar), BJWR-1, p.
402.
923 JE*, t. 1, pp. 469470.
924 Maxime Moiseyevich Winaver (18621926): a lawyer born in Warsaw, one of the founders
of the ConstitutionalDemocratic Party, of the Cadet party (1905), deputy in the Duma
(1906). Immigrated to France in 1919.
925 Goldenweizer, BJWR-1, p. 131.
926 Kurcherov, BJWR-1*, p. 404.
jurisdiction to 10%. The tsars government rejected this projectbut, as Mr.
Krohl said, this idea did not meet the condemnation it deserved in the
Russian public opinion, and within the Society of Jurists of Saint Petersburg,
only a few people protested vigorously; the rest, the vast majority, were
clearly in favour of the draft at the time of its discussion. 927 This gives an
unexpected insight into the state of mind of the capitals intelligentsia in the
mid-90s. (In the Saint Petersburg jurisdiction, 13.5% of the attorneys were
Jews, while in Moscow, less than 5%.928)
The prohibition for the clerks of solicitors to become themselves avowed
was felt all the more painfully because it followed limitations in the scientific
careers and the service of the State.929 It would not be lifted before 1904.
In the 80s, a limitation on the number of Jewish jurors was introduced in
the provinces of the Pale of Settlement, so that they did not have a majority
within the juries.
It was also from the 80s that the hiring of Jews in the judicial
administration ceased. There were, however, exceptions to this: thus J. Teitel,
who had been appointed shortly after his university studies, remained there
twentyfive years. He finished his career ennobled with the civil rank of general.
(It must be added that, later, Cheglovitov 930 forced him to retire of his own free
will.) In the exercise of his duties, he often had, he, the Israelite, to administer
oaths to Orthodox witnesses, and he never met any objection from the clergy. J.
M. Halpern, also an official in the judicial administration, had acceded to the
highranking position of Deputy Director of the Ministry of Justice and to the
rank of Secret Advisor.931 Halpern sat on the Pahlen Commission in the capacity
of expert. (Before that, the first prosecutor of the Senate had been G. I.
Trahtenberg, and his deputy G. B. Sliosberg had initiated himself to defend the
rights of the Jews.) He was also first prosecutor of the Senate S. J. Outinebut
he was baptised and consequently, was not taken into account.
The religious criterion has never been a false pretence for the tsarist
government, but has always been a real motive. It was because of this that the
old believers932, ethnically Russian, were ferociously persecuted for two and a
half centuries, as well as, later, the Dukhobors 933 and the Molokanes934, also
Russians.

927 JE, t. 1, pp. 471472.

928 Kurcherov, Ibidem, p. 405.
929 Ibidem.
930 Ivan Grigorievich Cheglovitov (18611918) Minister of Justice in 19061915, President of
the Council of the Empire. Shot without judgement by the Bolsheviks in retaliation for the
failed assassination of Fanny Kaplan against Lenin.
931 JE, t. 6, p. 118.
932 Old believers are adepts of the old faith, the one before the reforms imposed by the
Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century. They were persecuted.
933 Doukhobors are spirit fighters, a religious sect dating back to the seventeenth century,
which denies the Church as an institution, the state, and professes a kind of rationalistic
spiritualism.
934 See supra (p. 245).
 The baptised Jews were numerous in the service of the Russian State; we
will not discuss it in this book. Let us quote under Nicholas I, the Count K.
Nesselrod, who had a long career at the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
Ludwig Chtiglits, who received the barony in Russia935; Maximilian Heine,
brother of the poet and military doctor, who ended his career with the rank of
state councillor; Governor General Bezak, General of the suite of His Majesty
Adelbert, the Colonel of the Horse Guard Meves, the Hirs diplomats, one of
whom was Minister under Alexander III. Later, there was the Secretary of State
Perets (grandson of the taxcollector Abram Perets936), Generals Kaufman
Turkestansky and Khrulyov; The squire Salomon, director of the Alexandrovsky
high school; Senators Gredinger, Posen; in the Police Department, Gurovich,
Vissarionov, among many others.
Was the conversion to Christianity, especially to Lutheranism, in the eyes of
some considered as easy? Are all the tracks open to you at once? Sliosberg
observed at one point an almost massive denial on the part of young people. 937
But, of course, seen from the Jewish side, this appeared to be a grave betrayal,
a bonus to the abjuration of his faith When we think of the number of Jews
who resist the temptation to be baptised, one gains a great respect for this
unhappy people.938
Formerly, it was with candour: we divided people into two categories,
ours and others, according to the criterion of faith alone. This state of mind,
the Russian State, still reflected it in its dispositions. But, at the dawn of the
twentieth century, could it not have thought a little and wondered whether such
a procedure was morally permissible and practically effective? Could we
continue to offer the Jews material welfare at the cost of denying their faith?
And then what advantage could be derived from Christianity? Many of
these conversions were for pure convenience. (Some justified themselves by
luring themselves: I can thus be much more useful to my people.939)
For those who had obtained equal rights in the service of the State, there
no longer existed any restriction of any kind whatsoever which prevented them
from gaining access to hereditary nobility and to receive the highest rewards.
The Jews were commonly enrolled without difficulty in genealogical
records.940 And even, as we see from the census of 1897, 196 members of the
hereditary nobility counted Hebrew as their mother tongue (amongst the nobility
in their personal capacities and the civil servants, they were 3,371 in the same

935 JE, t. 16, p. 116.

936 Ibidem, t. 12, pp. 394395.
937 Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 94.
938 V. Posse, Evreiskoi zassiliie (The Jewish Violence), Slovo, Saint Petersburg, 1909, 14 (27)
March, p. 2.
939 Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 198.
940 JE, t. 7, p.34.
case941). There even was, among the Brodsky, a family of modest artisans,
Marshals of the nobility of the province of Ekaterinoslav.
But from the 70s of the nineteenth century onwards, Jews who sought
positions in the administration of the State began to encounter obstacles (and
this became worse from 1896 onwards); it must be said that few were those who
aspired to this kind of routine and poorly paid activity. Moreover, from the 90s,
the obstacles also affected the elective functions.
In 1890 a new Zemstvo Ordinance was issued, according to which the Jews
were excluded from the selfmanagement of the Zemstvoin other words,
outside the urban areas of the provinces and districts. It was planned to not
allow [the Jews] to participate in the electoral meetings and assemblies of the
Zemstvos942 (these did not yet exist in the western provinces). The motivation
was that Jews, who usually pursue their particular interests, do not meet the
demand for a real, living and social connection with local life. 943 At the same
time, to work in the Zemstvo as an independent contractor, to the title of what
was called the outsider element (element that would introduce into the
Zemstvo, several years in advance, the explosive charge of radicalism), was not
forbidden to Jewsand there they were many.
The restrictions in the Zemstvos did not affect the Jews of the central
Russian provinces because the great majority of them resided in the cities and
were more interested in urban administration. But in 1892 there appeared this
time a new provision for cities: the Jews lost the right to elect and to be elected
delegates to the Dumas and to the municipal offices, as well as to hold any
office of responsibility, or conduct there economic and administrative services.
This represented a more than sensible limitation. As delegates, Jews were
admitted only in cities of the Pale of Settlement, but here too, subject to a
restriction: no more than onetenth of the number of the municipal duma, and
again on assignment for the local administration that selected Jewish
candidatesan annoying procedure, to say the least. (Particularly for bourgeois
family men, as Sliosberg rightly points out: what a humiliation for them in
relation to their children how, after that, can they remain loyal to such a
government?944) There has been no harder time in the history of Russian Jews
in Russia. They were expelled from all positions they had conquered. 945 In
another passage, the same author speaks without ambiguity of the bribes
received by the officials of the Ministry of the Interior to act in favour of the
Jews.946 (That was to soften somewhat the rigour of the times.)

941 Obschii svod po Imperii rezoultatov razrabotki dannykh pervoi vseobschei perepisi
naseleniia, proizvedionnoi 28 ianvaria 1897 g. (General corpus of results for the empire of
the data of the first general census of the population carried out on January 28, 1897), t. 2,
Saint Petersburg, 1905, pp. 374386.
942 JE*, t. 7, p. 763.
943 Ibidem*, t. 1, p. 836.
944 Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 220.
945 Ibidem, t. 1, p. 259.
946 Ibidem, t. 2, pp. 177178.
 Yes, the Jews of Russia were undoubtedly bullied, victims of inequality in
civil rights. But this is what reminds us of the eminent Cadet V. A. Maklakov,
who found himself in the emigration after the revolution: The inequality in
rights of the Jews naturally lost its acuteness in a state where the enormous
mass of the population (82%), that on which the prosperity of the country
depended, the peasantrydull, mute, submissivewas also excluded from
common law, the same for all947and it stayed in the same situation after the
abolition of serfdom; for it also, military service was inescapable, secondary
and higher education inaccessible, and it did not obtain that selfadministration,
that rural Zemstvo which it much need. Another emigrant, D. O. Linsky, a Jew,
even bitterly concluded that, in comparison with the levelling up of the soviets,
when the entire population of Russia was deprived of all rights, the inequality
in the rights of the Jewish population before the revolution appears like an
inaccessible ideal.948
We have gotten used of saying: the persecution of the Jews in Russia. But
the word is not fair. It was not a persecution, strictly speaking. It was a whole
series of restrictions, of bullying. Vexing, admittedly, painful, even scandalous.

However, the Pale of Settlement, over the years, was becoming more and more
permeable.
According to the census of 1897, 315,000 Jews were already residing
outside its boundaries, that is to say, in sixteen years, a ninefold increase (and
this represented 9% of the total Jewish population of Russia apart from the
kingdom of Poland.949 Let us compare: there were 115,000 Jews in France, and
200,000 in Great Britain950). Let us consider also that the census gave
undervalued figures, in view of the fact that in many cities of Russia many
craftsmen, many servants serving authorised Jews did not have an official
existence, being shielded from registration.
Neither the top of the finance nor the educated elite were subject to the
restrictions of the Pale, and both were established freely in the central
provinces and in the capitals. It is well known that 14% of the Jewish
population practised liberal professions951not necessarily the intellectual
type. One thing, however, is certain: in prerevolutionary Russia, the Jews
occupied a prominent place in these intellectual occupations. The famous Pale

947 V. A. Maklakov (19051906), Sb. M. M. Winaver i rousskaia obschestvennost natchala XX

veka (Collection M. M. Winaver and Russian civil society in the early twentieth century),
Paris, 1937, p. 63.
948 D. O. Linsky, O natsionalnom samosoznanii ruskogo evreiaRossia i evrei (About the
national consciousness of the Jew of Russia), in RaJ, p. 145.
949 Hessen, t. 2, p. 210; JE, t. 11, pp. 537538.
950 SJE, t. 2, pp. 313314.
951 Larine, p. 71.
of Settlement itself did not in any way prevent a large fraction of the Jews from
penetrating more and more into the provinces of central Russia.952
The socalled artisanal trades where the Jews were the most numerous
were the dentists, the tailors, the nurses, the apothecaries, and a few others,
trades of great utility everywhere, where they were always welcome. In 1905,
in Russia, more than 1,300,000 Jews were engaged in artisanal activities, 953
which meant that they could live outside the Pale. And it must not be
forgotten either that nowhere in the laws it was stipulated, for example, that the
craftsman who exercises a trade has no right to engage in commerce at the same
time; moreover, the notion of doing business is not defined by law: for
example, depositselling with commission, is it trade? Thus, in order to
exercise any form of trade (even largescale trading), to engage in the purchase
of real estate, in the development of factories, one had to pass as artisan (or
dentist!) For example, the artisan Neimark possessed a factory of sixty
workers; typos thus opened their own printing press. 954 And there existed yet
another way: several people regroup, and only one pays the fee of the first guild,
the others pretending to be his clerks. Or even, to be adopted in a central
province by retired Jewish soldiers (the adopted father received a pension in
return955). In Riga, thousands of Jewish families lived on the timber trade until
they were expelled due to false attestations.956 At the dawn of the twentieth
century, Jewish settlements were found in all Russian cities of some importance.
J. Teitel testified that the construction of the SamaraOrenburg railway
line resulted in the influx of a large number of Jews to Samara. The supervisors
of this railway were JewsVarchavsky, Gorvitch. For a long time they were
also the owners. They occupied the control stations as well as a large number of
subordinate jobs. They brought their families from the Pale of Settlement, and
thus a very numerous Jewish colony was formed. They also took the export of
wheat from the rich province of Samara to foreign countries. It should be noted
that they were the first to export eggs from Russia to Western Europe. All these
activities were carried out by socalled artisans. And Teitel enumerates three
successive governors of the province of Samara as well as a chief of police
(who, previously, in 1863, had been excluded from the University of Saint
Petersburg for having participated in student disorders who closed their eyes
to these socalled artisans. Thus, around 1889, there lived in Samara more
than 300 Jewish families, without a residence permit957,which means that in
Samara, in addition to the official figures, there were in fact around 2,000 Jews.
Stories come to us from another end of Russia: at Viazma, the three
pharmacists, the six dentists, a number of doctors, notaries, many shopkeepers,

952 V. S. Mandel, Konservativnyie i razrouchitelnyie elementy v evreistve (Conservative

elements and destructive elements among Jews), RaJ, p. 202.
953 Goldenweiser, RaJ, p. 148.
954 Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 51, 197, 188, 193, 195.
955 Ibidem, pp. 2224.
956 Ibidem, pp. 183185.
957 Teirel, pp. 3637, 47.
almost all hairdressers, tailors, shoemakers were Jewish. All those who
appeared as such were not dentists or tailors, many traded and no one prevented
them from doing so. Of its 35,000 inhabitants, Viazma also had about two
thousand Jews.958
In the region of the Army of the Don, where severe restrictions were
imposed on Jews in 1880 and where they were forbidden to reside in Cossack
villages and suburbs of the cities, there were nevertheless 25,000 keepers of
inns and buffets, barbers, watchmakers, tailors. And any delivery of a quantity
of goods, no matter the size, depended on them.
The system of restrictions on the rights of the Jews, with the whole range of
corrections, reservations and amendments thereto, had been built up stratum
after stratum over the years. The provisions aimed at the Jews were scattered in
the various collections of laws promulgated at different times, badly harmonised
among themselves, badly amalgamated with the common laws of the empire.
The governors complained of it.959 We must try to penetrate the mysteries of the
innumerable derogations, special cases, exceptions of exceptions, which
swarmed the legislation on the Jews, to understand what journey of the
combatant this represented for the ordinary Jew, and what puzzle for the
administration. Such complexity could only engender formalism, with its
succession of cruelties; thus, when a head of a family domiciled in a central
Russian province lost his right of residence (after his death or as a result of a
change of profession), his whole family lost it with him. Families were thus
expelled after the death of the head of the family (with the exception of single
persons over 70 years of age).
However, complexity did not always play in disfavour of the Jews; it
sometimes played to their advantage. Authors write that it was the police
commissioners and their deputies who were responsible for settling the endless
wavering in the application of the restrictive measures, which resulted in the
use of bribes and to the circumvention of the law960always favourable to the
Jews. There were also perfectly workable legal channels. The contradictory
nature of the innumerable laws and provisions on Jews offers the Senate a broad
spectrum of interpretations of legislation In the 90s, most of the provisions
appealed by the Jews were annulled by the Senate. 961 The highest dignitaries
often closed their eyes to noncompliance with antiJewish restrictionsas G.
Sliosberg testified, for example: Ultimately, Jewish affairs depended on the
head of the police department, Pyotr Nikolayevich Dumovo The latter was
always open to the complainants arguments and I must say, to be honest, that if
the application of any restrictive regulation were contrary to human charity,
[Dournovo] would look into the matter and resolve it favourably.962
958 VolkovMouromrsev, pp. 98, 101.
959 S. Dimanstein, Revolioutsionnoie dvijeniie sredi evreiev (The Revolutionary Movement
Among the Jews), op. cit., p. 108.
960 Goldenweiser, BJWR-1, p. 114.
961 JE, t. 14, p. 157.
962 Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 175176.
 Rather than the new laws, it was the provisions tending to a harder
application of the old laws which were felt most painfully by the broad sections
of the Jewish population.963 The process, discreet but irreversible, by which the
Jews gradually penetrated into the provinces of central Russia was sometimes
stopped by the administration, and some duly orchestrated episodes went down
in history.
This was the case in Moscow after the retirement of the allpowerful and
almost irremovable Governor General V. A. Dolgorukov, who had regarded with
great kindness the arrival of the Jews in the city and their economic activity.
(The key to this attitude obviously resides in the person of the great banker
Lazar Solomonovich Poliakov, with whom Prince Dolgorukov had friendly
ties and who, evil tongues affirmed, had opened to him in his bank an unlimited
line of credit. That the prince had need of money, there was no doubt about it,
for he had yielded all his fortune to his soninlaw, while he himself loved to
live it up, and also had great spendings. Consequently, L. Poliakov was
covered year after year with honours and distinctions. Thanks to this, the Jews
of Moscow felt a firm ground beneath their feet: Every Jew could receive the
right of residence in the capital without actually putting himself at the service
of one of his coreligionists, a merchant of the first Guild.964)
G. Sliosberg informs us that Dolgorukov was accused of yielding too
much to the influence of Poliakov. And he explains: Poliakov was the owner of
the Moscow mortgage lending, so neither in the province of Moscow nor in any
neighbouring province could any other mortgage bank operate (i.e. granting
advances on property mortgagefunds). Now, there was no nobleman
possessing land that did not hypothecate his possessions. (Such was the defeat
of the Russian nobility at the end of the nineteenth century: and, after that, of
what use could it still be for Russia?) These noblemen found themselves in a
certain dependence on banks; to obtain large loans, all sought the favours of
Lazar Poliakov.965
Under the magistracy of Dolgorukov, around the 90s, there were many
recruitments of Jews in the body of merchants of the first guild. This was
explained by the reluctance of Muscovite merchants of Christian denomination
to pay the high entrance fees of this first guild. Before the arrival of the Jews,
the Muscovite industry worked only for the eastern part of the country, for
Siberia, and its goods did not run westward. It was the Jewish merchants and
industrialists who provided the link between Moscow and the markets of the
western part of the country. (Teitel confirms that the Jews of Moscow were
considered the richest and most influential in Russia.) Threatened by the
competition, German merchants became indignant and accused Dolgorukov of
favouritism towards the Jews.966
963 Hessen, t. 2, p. 232.
964 Prince B. A. Chetinine, Khoziaine Moskvy (The Master of Moscow), Istoritcheski vestnik
(The Historical Messenger), 1917, t. 148, p. 459.
965 Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 4445.
966 Ibidem, pp. 4344.
 But the situation changed dramatically in 1891. The new GovernorGeneral
of Moscow, the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich 967, an almighty man due to
his position and dependent on no one due to his fortune, took the decision to
expel all the Jewish craftsmen from Moscow, without any preliminary inquiry
as to who was truly a craftsman and who pretended to be a craftsman. Whole
neighbourhoodsZariadie, Marina Roschawere emptied of their inhabitants.
It is estimated that as many as 20,000 Jews were expelled. They were allowed a
maximum of six months to liquidate their property and organise their departure,
and those who declared that they did not have the means to ensure their
displacement were shipped in prison vans. (At the height of the expulsions and
to control how they were executed, an American government commission
Colonel Weber, Dr. Kamsterwent to Russia. The astonishing thing is that
Sliosberg brought them to Moscow, where they investigated what was
happening, how measures were applied to stem the influx of Jews, where they
even visited the Butyrka prison incognito, where they were offered a few pairs
of handcuffs, where they were given the photographs of people who had been
sent in the vans and the Russian police did not notice anything! (These were
the Krylov mores968!) They visited again, for many more weeks, other Russian
cities. The report of this commission was published in 1892 in the documents of
the American Congress to the greatest shame of Russia and to the liveliest
relief of Jewish immigration to the United States. 969 It is because of this
harassment that Jewish financial circles, Baron de Rothschild in the lead,
refused in 1892 to support Russian borrowing abroad. 970 There had already been
attempts in Europe in 1891 to stop the expulsion of the Jews from Moscow. The
AmericanJewish banker Seligman, for example, went to the Vatican to ask the
Pope to intercede with Alexander III and exhort him to more moderation. 971 In
1891, a part of the expelled Jews settled without permission in the suburbs of
Moscow. But in the fall of 1892, following the measures taken, an order was
made to expel from Moscow former soldiers of the retired contingent and
members of their families not registered in the communities.972 (It should be
noted that in 1893 the large Russian commercial and industrial enterprises
intervened to soften these measures.) Then, from 1899, there was almost no new
registration of Jews in the first guild of Moscow merchants.973
In 1893 a new aggravation of the fate of the Jews arose: the Senate first
noticed the existence of a bulletin issued by the Ministry of the Interior, in force

967 Sergey Alexandrovich: grandduke, brother of Alexander III, governorgeneral of Moscow.

Assassinated in February 1905.
968 Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (17691844): famous Russian publicist and fabulist who
denounces in his writings the defects of society and the negligence of the rulers.
969 Ibidem, pp. 31, 4250, 6063.
970 Ibidem, pp. 7, 174.
971 Doneseniie ruskogo posla lzvolskogo iz Vatikana (Report of the Russian Ambassador to the
Vatican, Lzvolski), 7 (19) April 1892, Izvestia, 1930, 23 May, p. 2.
972 SJE, t. 5, p. 474.
973 JE, t. 11, pp. 336338.
since 1880 (the Charter of Jewish Freedom) which allowed Jews who had
already established themselves outside the Pale of Settlement, illegally however,
to remain where they were. This bulletin was repealed (except in Courland and
Livonia where it was retained). The number of families who had settled over the
last twelve years amounted to 70,000! Fortunately, thanks to Dournovo, life
saving articles were enacted which, in the end, prevented the immense
catastrophe that threatened.974
In 1893, certain categories of Jews were expelled in turn from Yalta, for
the summer residence of the Imperial family was not far away, and they were
forbidden any new settlement there: The always increasing influx in the
number of Jews in the city of Yalta, the appetite for real estate, threatens this
holiday resort of becoming, purely and simply, a Jewish city. 975 (here could
have been at play, after all the terrorist attacks in Russia, the security of the
Imperial family in its residence in Livadia. Alexander III had every reason to
believehe was only one year away from his deaththat he was cordially
hated by the Jews. It is not possible to exclude as motive the idea of avenging
the persecution of the Jews, as can be deduced by the choice of terrorist targets
Sipiagin, Plehve, Grand Duke Serge.) This did not prevent many Jews from
remaining in the Yalta regionjudging from what the inhabitants of Alushta
wrote in 1909, complaining that the Jews, buyers of vineyards and orchards,
exploit to foster their development the work of the local population, taking
advantage of the precarious situation of said population and granting loans at
exorbitant rates which ruin the Tatars, inhabitants of the site.976
But there was also another thing in the favour of the tireless struggle
against smuggling, the right of residence of the Jews in the Western frontier
zone was limited. There was in fact no further expulsionwith the exception of
individuals caught in the act of smuggling. (According to memorialists, this
smuggling, which consisted in passing the frontier to revolutionaries and their
printed works, continued until the First World War.) In 1903 1904, a debate
ensued: the Senate provides that the Provisional Regulations of 1882 shall not
apply to the frontier zone and that accordingly Jews residing in that area may
freely settle in the rural areas. The Council of the Province of Bessarabia then
issued a protest, informing the Senate that the entire Jewish population in the
border area, including those where Jews had illegally settled there, was now
seeking to gain access to the countryside where there were already more Jews
than needed, and that the border area now risked becoming for the Jews the
Promised Area. The protest passed before the Council of State, which, taking
into account the particular case of rural localities, squarely abolished the special
regime of the border area, bringing it back to the general regime of the Pale of
Settlement.977

974 Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 180182.

975 JE*, t. 7, p. 594.
976 Novoie Vremia, 1909, 9 (22) Dec., p. 6.
977 JE, t. 12, pp. 601602.
 This softening, however, did not find significant echo in the press or in
society. No more than the lifting, in 1887, of the prohibition of the Jews to hire
Christian servants. Nor did the 1891 Act introducing into the Penal Code a new
article on responsibility in the event of an open attack on part of the population
by another, an article that the circumstances of life in Russia had never
required, but which had been sorely lacking during the pogroms of 1881. For
greater caution it was now introduced.

And again, let us repeat: the limitations on the rights of the Jews never assumed
a racial character in Russia. They applied neither to the Karaites 978, nor to the
Jews of the mountains, nor to the Jews of Central Asia, who, scattered and
merged with the local population, had always freely chosen their type of
activity.
The most diverse authors explain to us, each one more than the other, that
the root causes of the restrictions suffered by Jews in Russia are of an economic
nature. The Englishman J. Parks, the great defender of these restrictions,
nevertheless expresses this reservation: Before the war [of 1418], some Jews
had concentrated considerable wealth in their hands This had led to fear that
abolishing these limitations would allow the Jews to become masters of the
country.979 Professor V. Leontovitch, a perfectly consistent liberal, notes: Until
recently, we seemed to be unaware that the restrictive measures imposed on
Jews came much more from anticapitalist tendencies than from racial
discrimination. The concept of race was of no interest to Russia in those years,
except for specialists in ethnology It is the fear of the strengthening of the
capitalist elements, which could aggravate the exploitation of peasants and of
all the workers, which was decisive. Many sources prove this. 980 Let us not
forget that the Russian peasantry had just undergone the shock of a sudden
mutation: from the transition of feudal relations to market relations, a passage to
which it was not at all prepared and which would throw it into an economic
maelstrom sometimes more pitiless than serfdom itself.
V. Choulguine writes in this regard as follows: The limitation of the rights
of the Jews in Russia was underpinned by a humanistic thought It was
assumed that the Russian people, taken globally (or at least some of their social
strata) was, in a way, immature, effeminate, that it allowed itself to be easily

978 The Karaites or Karames (word meaning attached to the letter): a Jewish sect that rejects
the orthodox doctrine of the rabbis, admits only the Old Testament and some oral traditions.
The Karaites survive in small settlements in Crimea, Odessa, Southern Russia, as well as in
Poland and Lithuania.
979 J. Parks, Evrei sredi narodov Obzor pritchin antisemitima (The Jews among Peoples: An
Overview of the Causes of AntiSemitism), Paris, YMCA Press, 1932, p. 182.
980 V. V. Leontovitch, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii 17621914 (History of liberalism in Russia:
17621914), transl. of the German, 2nd ed., M., Rousski Pout, 1995, pp. 251252. French
translation to Fayard Ed., Paris, 1987.
exploited, that for this reason it had to be protected by state measures against
foreign elements stronger than itself. Northern Russia began to look at the Jews
with the eyes of Southern Russia. The LittleRussians had always seen the Jews,
whom they knew well in the days of their coexistence with Poland, under the
guise of the pawnbrokers who suck the blood of the unfortunate Russian. 981
The restrictions were designed by the government to combat the massive
economic pressure that put the foundations of the state at risk. Parks also detects
in this vision of things a part of truth; he observes the disastrous effect which
the faculty of exploiting ones neighbour may have, and the excessive role of
innkeepers and usurers in the rural areas of Eastern Europe, even if he
perceives the reasons for such a state of affairs in the peasants nature more
than in the Jews themselves. In his opinion, the vodka trade, as the main
activity of the Jews in Eastern Europe, gave rise to hatred, and among the
peasants even more than among the others. It was he who fed more than one
pogrom, leaving a deep and broad scar in the consciousness of the Ukrainian
and Belarusian peoples, as well as in the memory of the Jewish people.982
We read in many authors that the Jewish innkeepers lived very hard,
without a penny, that they were almost reduced to begging. But was the alcohol
market as narrow as that? Many people grew fat with the intemperance of the
Russian peopleand the landowners of Western Russia, and the distillers, and
the drinkinghouse keepers and the government! The amount of revenue can
be estimated from the time it was entered as national revenue. After the
introduction of a state monopoly on spirits in Russia in 1896, with the abolition
of all private debits and the sale of beverages by excise duty, the Treasury
collected 285 million rubles in the following yearto report to the 98 millions
of the direct tax levied on the population. This confirms that not only was the
manufacture of spirits a major source of indirect contributions, but also that
the spirits industrys revenues, which until 1896 only paid 4 kopecks of excise
duty per degree of alcohol produced, were much higher than the direct
revenues of the empire.983
But what was at that time the Jewish participation in this sector? In 1886,
during the works of the Pahlen Commission, statistics were published on the
subject. According to these figures, Jews held 27% (the decimals do not appear
here: the numbers have been rounded up everywhere) of all distilleries in
European Russia, 53% in the Pale of Settlement (notably 83% in the province of
Podolsk, 76% in that of Grodno, 72% in that of Kherson). They held 41% of
breweries in European Russia, 71% in the Pale of Settlement (94% in the
province of Minsk, 91% in the province of Vilnius, 85% in the province of
Grodno). The proportion of manufacturing and sales points in Jewish commerce
981 V. V. Choulguine, Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa: Ob antiSemiticism v Rossii (What we do
not like about them: On antiSemitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, pp. 185186.
982 Parks, pp. 153, 155, 233.
983 Sbornik materalov ob ekonomitcheskom polojenii evreiev v Rossii (Collection of materials
on the economic situation of Jews in Russia), vol. 2, St., Evreiskoie Kolonizatsionnoie
Obschestvo (Jewish Colonising Association), 1904, p. 64.
is 29% in European Russia, 61% in the Pale of Settlement (95% in the province
of Grodno, 93% in Mogilev, 91% in the province of Minsk).984
It is understandable that the reform which established the state monopoly
on spirits was greeted with horror by the Jews of the Pale of Settlement.985
It is incontestable: the establishment of a State monopoly on spirits dealt a
very severe blow to the economic activity of the Jews of Russia. And until the
First World War (it ended at that time), this monopoly remained the favourite
target of general indignationwhereas it merely instituted a rigorous control of
the amount of alcohol produced in the country, and its quality. Forgetting that it
reached the Christian tenants in the same way (see the statistics above), it is
always presented as an antiJewish measure: The introduction at the end of the
90s of the sale of alcohol by the State in the Pale of Settlement has deprived
more than 100,000 Jews of their livelihood; Power meant forcing the Jews
to leave the rural areas, and since then this trade has lost for the Jews the
importance it once had.986
It was indeed the momentfrom the end of the nineteenth centurywhen
Jewish emigration from Russia grew remarkably. Is there a link between this
emigration and the establishment of the state monopoly on the sale of spirits?
That is difficult to say, but the figure of 100,000 quoted above suggests so. The
fact is that Jewish emigration (in America) remained low until 18861887; it
experienced a brief surge in 18911892, but it was only after 1897 that it
became massive and continuous.987
The Provisional Regulations of 1882 had not prevented further
infiltration of Jewish spirits into the countryside. Just as, in the 70s, they had
found a loophole against the prohibition of selling elsewhere than home by
inventing street commerce. It had been devised to circumvent the law of May
3rd, 1882 (which also forbade the commerce of vodka by contract issued with a
Jew), leasing on the sly: to set up an inn there, one rented a land by oral and
not written contract, in order for the taxes to be covered by the owner, and the
proceeds from the sale of drinks went to the Jew.988 It was through this and other
means that the implantation of the Jews in the countryside could continue after
the categorical prohibition of 1882. As Sliosberg writes, it was from 1889 that
began the wave of expulsions of the Jews outside the villages of the Pale of
Settlement, which resulted in a pitiless competition, generating a terrible evil:
denunciation (in other words, Jews began to denounce those among them who
lived illegally). But here are the figures put forward by P. N. Miliukov: if in
1881 there were 580,000 Jews living in villages, there were 711,000 Jews in
1897, which means that the rate of new arrivals and births far outweighed those

984 Evreiskaia pitenaia torgovlia v Rossii. Statistitcheski Vremennik Rossiiskoy Imperii (The
Jewish Trade of Spirits in Russia, Statistical Yearbook of the Russian Empire), Series III,
Book 9, Saint Petersburg, 1886, p. VX.
985 Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 230.
986 Evreiskaya piteinaia torgovlia v Rossii (Jewish trade of spirits in Russia), op. cit.
987 JE, t. 2, pp. 235238.
988 Cf. Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 55.
of evictions and deaths. In 1899, a new Committee for Jewish Affairs, the
eleventh of the name, with Baron Lexhull von Hildebrandt at its head, was set
up to revise the Provisional Regulations. This Committee, wrote Miliukov,
rejected the proposal to expel from the countryside the Jews who illegally
established themselves there, and softened the law of 1882.989
While recognising that the peasantry, which is not very developed, has no
entrepreneurial spirit and no means of development, must be protected from any
contact with Jews, the Committee insisted that the landowners have no need
for the tutelage of the government; the limitation of the right of the owners to
manage their property as they see fit depreciates said property and compels the
proprietors to employ, in concert with the Jews, all sorts of expedients to
circumvent the law; the lifting of prohibitions on Jews will enable landowners
to derive greater benefit from their assets. 990 But the proprietors no longer had
the prestige, which might have given weight to this argument in the eyes of the
administration.
It was in 19031904 that the revision of the Regulations of 1882 was
seriously undertaken. Reports came from the provinces (notably from
Sviatopolk Mirsky, who was GovernorGeneral and soon to become the Liberal
Minister of the Interior), saying that the Regulations had not proved their worth,
that it was imperative that the Jews should leave towns and villages where their
concentration was too high, and that, thanks to the establishment of a State
monopoly on beverages, the threat of Jewish exploitation of the rural population
was removed. These proposals were approved by Sipyagin, the minister (who
was soon to be shot down by a terrorist), and, in 1908, endorsed by Plehve
(soon assassinated in his turn). A list of a hundred and one villages had been
drawn up and published, to which fiftyseven others would soon be added, in
which the Jews acquired the right to settle and purchase real estate, and to lease
it. (In the Jewish Encyclopdia dating before the revolution, we read the names
of these localities, some of which, already quite important, were to spread
rapidly: Yuzovka, Lozovaya, Ienakievo, Krivoy Rog, Sinelnikovo, Slavgorod,
Kakhovka, Zhmerynka, Chepetovka, Zdolbuniv, Novye Senjary, among others.)
Outside this list and Jewish agricultural settlements, Jews did not get the right
to acquire land. However, the Regulations were soon abrogated for certain
categories: graduates of higher studies, pharmacists, artisans and former retired
soldiers. These people were given the right to reside in the countryside, to
engage in commerce and various other trades.991
While the sale of spirits and the various kinds of farmingincluding that
of the landwere the main sources of income for Jews, there were others,
including notably the ownership of land. Among the Jews, the aspiration to
989 P. Miliukov, Evreiski vopros v rossii (The Jewish Question in Russia), Schit: Literatourny
sbornik (The Shield: Literary Collection) edited by L. Andreev, M. Gorky and F. Sologoub,
3rd ed., M. Rousskoie Obschestvo dlia izoutcheniia evreiskoi jizni (Russian Association for
the Study of Jewish Life), 1916, p. 170.
990 JE, t. 5, pp. 821822.
991 Ibidem, t. 5, pp. 821822.
possess the land was expressed by the acquisition of large areas capable of
harbouring several types of activities rather than by the use of small parcels
which are to be developed by the owner himself.992 When the land, which gives
life to the peasant, reaches a higher price than that of a purely agricultural
property, it was not uncommon for a Jewish entrepreneur to acquire it.
As we have seen, the direct leasing and purchasing of the land by the Jews
was not prohibited until 1881, and the purchasers were not deprived of their
rights by the new prohibitions. This is how, for example, Trotskys father, David
Bronstein, possessed in the province of Kherson, not far from Elizabethgrad,
and held in his possession until the revolution an important business (an
economy as it was called in the South). He also owned, later on, the
Nadejda mine in the suburb of Krivoi Rog.993 On the basis of what he had
observed in the exploitation of his fatherand, as he heard it, in all farms it is
the same, Trotsky relates that the seasonal workers, who had come by foot
from the central provinces to be hired, were very malnourished: never meat nor
bacon, oil but very little, vegetables and oatmeal, thats all, and this, during the
hard summer work, from dawn to twilight, and even, one summer, an epidemic
of hemeralopia994 was declared among the workers.995 For my part, I will argue
that in an economy of the same type, in Kuban, with my grandfather Scherbak
(himself a member of a family of agricultural workers), the day workers were
served, during the harvest, meat three times a day.
But a new prohibition fell in 1903: A provision of the Council of
Ministers deprived all Jews of the right to acquire immovable property
throughout the empire, outside urban areas, that is to say in rural areas.996 This
limited to a certain extent the industrial activity of the Jews, but, as the Jewish
Encyclopdia points out, by no means their agricultural activity; in any case,
to use the right to acquire land, the Jews would undoubtedly have delegated
fewer cultivators than landlords and tenants. It seems doubtful whether a
population as urban as the Jewish population was able to supply a large number
of farmers.997
In the early years of the twentieth century, the picture was as follows:
About two million hectares which are now owned or leased by Jews in the
empire and the Kingdom of Poland only 113,000 are home to Jewish
agricultural settlements.998

992 Ibidem, t. 1, p. 422.

993 Fabritchnozavodskie predpriatia Rossiskoi Imperii (Factories and Plants of the Russian
Empire), 2nd ed., Council of Congresses of Industry and Commerce, 1914, No. 590.
994 Hemeralopia (in Russian: kourinaa slepota = chicken blindness) weakening or loss of
vision in low light, especially at dusk.
995 L. Trotsky, Moia jizn : Opyt avtobiografii (My Life: autobiographical), t. 1, Berlin, Granit,
1930, pp. 4243.
996 JE, t. 7, p. 734.
997 JE, t. 1, p. 423.
998 Ibidem.
 Although the Provisional Regulations of 1882 prohibited the Jews from
buying or leasing out of towns and villages, devious means were also found
there, notably for the acquisition of land intended for the sugar industry.
Thus the Jews who possessed large areas of land were opposed to the
agrarian reform of Stolypin, which granted land to the peasants on a personal
basis. (They were not the only ones: one is astonished at the hostility with
which this reform was received by the press of those years, and not only by that
of the extreme right, but by the perfectly liberal press, not to mention the
revolutionary press.) The Jewish Encyclopdia argues: The agrarian reforms
that planned to cede land exclusively to those who cultivated it would have
harmed the interests of a part of the Jewish population, that which worked in the
large farms of Jewish owners.999 It was not until the Revolution passed that a
Jewish author took a look back and, already boiling with proletarian
indignation, wrote: The Jewish landowners possessed under the tsarist regime
more than two million hectares of land (mainly around Ukrainian sugar
factories, as well as large estates in Crimea and Belarus), and, moreover, they
owned more than two million hectares of the best land, black earth. Thus,
Baron Ginzburg possessed in the district of Dzhankoy 87,000 hectares; the
industrialist Brodsky owned tens of thousands of hectares for his sugar mills,
and others owned similar estates, so that in total the Jewish capitalists combined
872,000 hectares of arable land.1000
After the land ownership came the trade of wheat and cereal products. (Let
us remember that the export of grain was chiefly carried out by Jews. 1001 Of
the total Jewish population of the USSR, not less than 18%, before the
revolution (i.e. more than one million people!] were engaged in the trade of
wheat, bosses and members of their families alike, which caused a real
animosity of the peasants towards the Jewish population (because the big
buyers did everything to lower the price of the wheat in order to resell it for
more profit.1002) In the western provinces and in Ukraine, the Jews bought in
bulk other agricultural commodities. (Moreover, how can we not point out that
in places like Klintsy, Zlynka, Starodub, Ielenovka, Novozybkov, the old
believers, workers and industrious, never let trade go by other hands?)
Biekerman believes that the prohibition of Jewish merchants to operate
throughout the territory of Russia fostered apathy, immobility, domination by
the kulaks. However, If Russias trade in wheat has become an integral part of
world trade, Russia owes it to the Jews. As we have already seen, as early as
1878, 60% of wheat exports from the port of Odessa were by Jews. They were
the first to develop the wheat trade at Nikolayev, Kherson, RostovonDon, as
well as in the provinces of Orel, Kursk, and Chernigov. They were well

999 Ibidem.
1000Larine, pp. 27, 6869, 170.
1001SJE, t. 7, p. 337.
1002Larine, p. 70.
represented in the wheat trade in Saint Petersburg. And in the NorthWest
region, out of 1,000 traders of cereal products there were 930 Jews.1003
However, most of our sources do not shed light on how these Jewish
merchants behaved with their trading partners. In fact, they were often very hard
and practised procedures that today we would consider illicit; they could, for
example, agree among themselves and refuse to buy the crop in order to bring
down prices. It is understandable that in the 90s farmers cooperatives (under
the leadership of Count Heiden and Bekhteyev) were set up in the southern
provinces for the first time in Russia and a step ahead of Europe. Their mission
was to thwart these massive, monopolistic purchases of peasant wheat.
Let us recall another form of commerce in the hands of the Jews: the
export of wood came second after the wheat.1004 From 1813 to 1913, these
exports were multiplied by 140! And the Communist Larinus fulminated: The
Jewish proprietors possessed large forested areas, and they leased a part of it,
even in the provinces where the Jews were not normally allowed to reside. 1005
The Jewish Encyclopdia confirms it: The Jews acquired the land, especially
in the central provinces, chiefly to exploit the forest wealth. 1006 However, as
they did not have the right to install sawmills in some places, the wood left
abroad in the raw state, for a dead loss for the country. (There existed other
prohibitions: access for export of timber in the ports of Riga, Revel, Petersburg;
the installation of warehouses along the railways).1007
Such is the picture. Everything is there. And the tireless dynamism of
Jewish commerce, which drives entire states. And the prohibitions of a
timorous, sclerotic bureaucracy that only hinders progress. And the ever
increasing irritation these prohibitions provoke among the Jews. And the sale of
the Russian forest, exported abroad in its raw state, as a raw material. And the
small farmer, the small operator, who, caught in a merciless vise, has neither the
relationships nor the skills to invent other forms of trade. And let us not forget
the Ministry of Finance, which pours its subsidies on industry and railways and
abandons agriculture, whereas the tax burden is carried by the class of the
farmers, not the merchants. One wonders: under the conditions of the new
economic dynamics that came to replenish the Treasury and was largely due to
the Jews, was there anyone to worry about the harm done to the common
people, the shock suffered by it, from the break in its way of life, in its very
being?
For half a century, Russia has been accusedfrom the inside as well as
from the outsideof having enslaved the Jews economically and having forced
them to misery. It was necessary that the years passed, that this abominable
Russia disappear from the surface of the earth, it will be necessary to cross the
1003I. M. Dijour, Evrei v ekonomitcheskjizni Rossii (The Jews in the Economic Life of
Russia), BJWRl *, p. 172.
1004Ibidem*, p. 173.
1005Larine, p.69.
1006JE, t. 1, p. 423.
1007Dijour, SJE-1, p. 173.
revolutionary turmoil for a Jewish author of the 30s to look at the past, over the
bloody wall of the Revolution, and acknowledge: The tsarist government has
not pursued a policy of total eviction of Jews from economic life. Apart from
the wellknown limitations in the countryside, on the whole, the tsarist
government tolerated the economic activity of the Jews. The tensions of the
national struggle, the Jews did not feel them in their economic activity. The
dominant nation did not want to take the side of a particular ethnic group, it was
only trying to play the role of arbiter or mediator.1008
Besides, it happened that the government was intruding into the economy
on national grounds. It then took measures which, more often than not, were
doomed to failure. Thus, in 1890, a bulletin was diffused under which the Jews
lost the right to be directors of corporations that intended to purchase or lease
lands.1009 But it was the childhood of the art of circumventing this law:
remaining anonymous. This kind of prohibition in no way impeded the activity
of Jewish entrepreneurs. The role of Jews was especially important in foreign
trade where their hegemony was assured and their geographical location (near
borders) and by their contacts abroad, and by their commercial intermediaries
skills.1010
As regards to the sugar industry, more than a third of the factories were
Jewish at the end of the century.1011 We have seen in previous chapters how the
industry had developed under the leadership of Israel Brodsky and his sons
Lazar and Leon (at the beginning of the twentieth century, they controlled
directly or indirectly seventeen sugar mills1012). Galperine Moses, in the early
twentieth century had eight factories and three refineries He also owned
50,000 hectares of sugar beet cropland.1013
Hundreds of thousands of Jewish families lived off the sugar industry,
acting as intermediaries, sellers, and so on. When competition appeared, as the
price of sugar began to fall, a syndicate of sugar producers in Kiev called for
control of production and sale, in order for prices not to fall. 1014 The Brodsky
Brothers were the founders of the Refiners Union in 1903.1015
In addition to the grain trade, the wood trade and the sugar industry where
they occupied a predominant position, other areas must be cited in which the
Jews largely contributed to development: flour milling, fur trade, spinning mills,
confection, the tobacco industry, the brewery.1016 In 1835 they were also present
at the major fairs in Nizhny Novgorod. 1017 In Transbaikalia they launched a
1008A. Menes, Evreiski vopros v Vostotchno Evrope (The Jewish Question in Eastern Europe),
JW-1, p. 146.
1009SJE, t. 7, p. 368.
1010JE, t. 13, p. 646.
1011Ibidem, p. 662.
1012RJE, t. 1, p. 171.
1013Ibidem, p. 264.
1014Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 231.
1015RJE, t. 1, p. 171.
1016Dijour, BJWR-1, pp. 163174.
1017JE, t. 11, p. 697.
livestock trade which took off in the 90s, and the same happened in Siberia for
the production of coalAndjeroSoudji hard coaland the extraction of gold,
where they played a major role. After 1892, the Ginzburg devoted themselves
almost exclusively to the extraction of gold. The most prosperous enterprise
was the Lena Gold Mining Company, which was controlled in fact (from 1896
until its death in 1909) by Baron Horace Ginzburg, son of Evzel Ginzburg,
founder of the Bank of the same name and president of its branch in Saint
Petersburg. (The son of Horace, David, also a baron, remained at the head of the
Jewish community of Saint Petersburg until his death in 1910. His sons
Alexander and Alfred sat on the board of Lena, the gold mining company.
Another son, Vladimir, married the daughter of the owner of the Kiev sugar
factory, L. I. Brodsky.) Horace Ginzburg was also the founder of the gold
extraction companies from Transbaikalia, Miias, Berezovka, Altai and a few
others.1018 In 1912, a huge scandal about the Lena mines broke out and caused
quite a stir throughout the country: the operating conditions were abominable,
the workers had been misled Appropriately, the tsarist government was
accused of everything and demonised. No one, in the raging liberal press
mentioned the main shareholders, notably the Ginzburg sons.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews represented 35% of the
merchant class in Russia.1019 Choulguine gives us what he observed in the
southwest region: Where have they gone, Russian traders, where is the Russian
third estate? In time, we had a strong Russian bourgeoisie Where have
they gone? They were ousted by the Jews, lowered into the social ladder, to
the state of moujiks.1020 The Russians in the southwest region have chosen their
own fate: it is clear. And at the beginning of the century, the eminent politician
V. I. Gourko1021 observed: The place of the Russian merchant is more and more
frequently taken by a Jew.1022
The Jews also gained influence and authority in the booming sector of the
cooperative system. More than half of the Mutual Credit and Savings and Loan
Companies were in the Pale of Settlement (86% of their members in 1911 were
Jewish).1023
We have already spoken of the construction and operation of the Russian
railways by the Poliakov brothers, Bliokh and Varshavsky. With the exception
of the very first lines (the Tsarskoselskaya line and the Nikolaevskaya line),
almost all the railways that were later built were made by concessionary

1018SJE, t. 7, p. 369; RJE, t. 1, pp. 315316; JE, t. 6, p. 527.

1019M. Vernatsky, Evrei i rousskoie narodnoie khoziaistvo (The Jews and the Russian
Economy), p. 30.
1020Choulguine, pp. 128129.
1021Vladimir Yossifovich Gourko (18631917): Deputy Minister of the Interior in 1906,
elected member of the Council of the Empire since 1912. Emigrated after the Civil War.
1022Vf Gourko, Oustoi narodnogo khoziastva v Rossii: Agrarnoekonomitcheskie etiudy (The
Foundations of the National Economy in Russia: Agrarian and Economic Studies), Saint
Petersburg, 1902, p. 199.
1023Dijour, BJWR-1, p. 176.
companies in which the Jews occupied the command posts; But, as of the
1890s, the state was the first builder. On the other hand, it is under the
leadership of David Margoline that was created in 1883 the great shipping
company on the Dnieper and its tributaries, the main shareholders of which
were Jews. In 1911, the company owned a fleet of 78 vessels and accounted for
71% of the traffic on the Dnieper.1024 Other companies operating on the Western
Dvina, the Niemen, joined the Mariinsky Canal and the Volga.
There were also about ten oil companies belonging to Jews from Baku.
The biggest were the oil company belonging to the brothers S. and M. Poliak
and to Rothschild, and the jointstock company of the CaspianBlack Sea,
behind which was also found the name of Rothschild. These companies were
not allowed to extract oil; they specialised in refining and exporting.1025
But it was in finance that the economic activity of the Jews was the most
brilliant. Credit is an area where Jews have long felt at home. They have
created new ways and have perfected the old. They played a leading role in the
hands of a few large capitalists and in the organisation of commercial
investment banks. The Jews brought out of their ranks not only the banking
aristocracy but also the mass of employees.1026 The bank of Evzel Ginzburg,
founded in 1859 in Saint Petersburg, grew and strengthened thanks to its links
with the Mendelssohn in Berlin, the Warburg in Hamburg, the Rothschild in
Paris and Vienna. But when the financial crisis of 1892 broke out, and because
of the governments refusal to support its bank with loans, as had happened
twice before, E. Ginzburg withdrew from business. 1027 By the 70s, there existed
a network of banks founded by the three Poliakov brothers, Jacob, Samuel and
Lazar. These are the AzovDon Commercial Bank (to be later managed by B.
Kaminka), the Mortgage Lending of Moscow, the Don Land Bank, the Poliakov
Bank, the International Bank and a few other houses which will later form the
Unified Bank.The Bank of Siberia had A. Soloveitchik at its head, the
Commercial Bank of Warsaw was directed by I. Bliokh. In several other large
establishments, Jews occupied important posts (Zak, Outine, Khesine, A.
Dobryi, Vavelberg, Landau, Epstein, Krongold). In two large banks only, the
Commercial Bank of Moscow and that of the VolgaKama, there were no Jews
either in the leadership or among the staff.1028 The Poliakov brothers all had the
rank of secret counsellor and, as we have said, all three were granted hereditary
nobility.1029

1024SJE, t. 7, p. 369.
1025Dijour, BJWR-1, pp. 178179; JE, t. 13, p. 660; SJE, t. 7, p. 369.
1026JE, t. 13, pp. 651652.
1027JE, t. 6, p. 527.
1028Dijour, BJWR-1, pp. 174175; SJE, t. 6, pp. 670671.
1029JE, t. 12, p. 734; SJE, t. 6, pp. 670671.
Thus, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Pale of Settlement had already
completely emptied itself of its substance. It had not prevented the Jews from
occupying solid positions in the vital sectors of the countrys life, from economy
and finance to the intellectual sphere. The Pale no longer had any practical
utility; its economic and political purpose was outdated. It had only filled the
Jews with antigovernment bitterness and resentment; it had thrown oil on the
fire of social discontent and had struck the Russian government with the seal of
infamy in the eyes of the West.
But let us be clear: this Russian Empire, with the slowness and sclerosis of
its bureaucracy, the mentality of its leaders, where and in what way did it fall
behind all through the nineteenth century and decades before the revolution? It
had been unable to settle a dozen major problems affecting the life of the
country. It had not been able to organise local civil selfgovernment, install
zemstvos in rural districts, carry out agrarian reform, remedy the state of
pernicious state of humiliation of the Church, or communicate with civil society
and make its action understood. It had managed neither the boom of mass
education nor the development of Ukrainian culture. To this list let us add
another point where the delay proved catastrophic: the revision of the real
conditions of the Pale of Settlement, the awareness of their influence on all
positionings of the State. The Russian authorities have had a hundred years and
more to solve the problems of the Jewish population, and they have not been
able to do so, neither in the sense of an open assimilation nor by allowing the
Jews to remain in voluntary isolation, that which was already theirs a century
before.
Meanwhile, during the decades from the 70s to the beginning of the
twentieth century, Russian Judaism experienced a rapid development, an
undeniable blossoming of its elite, which already felt cramped, not only within
the limits of the Pale of Settlement, but in those of the empire.
When analysing the concrete aspects of the inequality in Jewish rights in
Russia, the Pale of Settlement and the numerus clausus, we must not lose sight
of this general picture. For if American Judaism grew in importance, the Jews of
Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century still constituted nearly half of
the Jewish population of the planet.1030 This is to be remembered as an
important fact in the history of Judaism. And it is still Mr. Biekerman who,
looking behind him over the ditch of the revolution, wrote in 1924: Tsarist
Russia was home to more than half the Jewish people. It is natural,
consequently, that the Jewish history of the generations that are closest to us is
mainly the history of the Jews of Russia. And even though in the nineteenth
century the Jews of the West had been richer, more influential, and more
cultured than we were, the vitality of Judaism was nevertheless in Russia. And
this vitality grew stronger and stronger at the same time as the Russian Empire
flourished It was only when provinces populated by Jews were united to
Russia that this rebirth began. The Jewish population grew rapidly in number, to
1030SJE, t. 2, pp. 313314.
such an extent that it was able to leave a very numerous colony overseas; it had
amassed and possessed important capital in its hands; a middle class had grown
and acquired authority; the standard of living of the lower strata had also grown
incessantly. By a variety of efforts, the Jews of Russia had been able to
overcome the physical and moral abjection which they had brought from
Poland; European culture and education reached Jewish circles and we went
so far in this direction, we have amassed such spiritual wealth that we have
been able to afford the luxury of having a literature in three languages All
this culture, all this wealth, it is in Russia that the Jews of Eastern Europe have
received them. Russian Judaism, by its numbers and by the greenness of the
energies it contained, proved to be the backbone of all the Jewish people.1031
A more recent author, our contemporary, confirms in 1989 the correctness
of this painting brushed by his elder, witness of the time. He wrote: The public
life of the Jews of Russia had reached, at the turn of the two centuries, a degree
of maturity and amplitude which many small peoples in Europe might have
envied.1032
If there is a reproach that cannot be made to the prison of the people, it is
to have denationalised the people, be it the Jews or others.
Certain Jewish authors, it is true, deplore the fact that in the 80s the
cultivated Jews of the capital had hardly been involved in the defence of Jewish
interests, that only Baron Ginzburg and a few other wealthy Jews with good
relations.1033 The Jews of Petersburg (30,000 to 40,000 in 1900) lived
unconnected with one another, and the Jewish intelligentsia, in its majority,
remained aloof, indifferent to the needs and interests of the community as a
whole.1034 Yet it was also the time when the holy spirit of the Renaissance
hovered over the Pale of Settlement and awakened in the younger generations
the forces that had been dormant for many centuries among the Jewish people
It was a veritable spiritual revolution. Among Jewish girls, the thirst for
instruction showed literarily religious signs. And already, even in Saint
Petersburg, a large number of Jewish students frequented higher education
institutions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a great part of the
Jewish intelligentsia felt that it was its duty to return to its people.1035
Thanks to this spiritual awakening at the end of the nineteenth century, very
diverse and sometimes contradictory trends emerged in Russian Judaism. Some

1031I. M. Bickerman, Rossiia i rousskoie evreistvo (Russia and Russian Judaism), RJE, pp. 84
85, 87.
1032E. Finkelstein, Evrei v SSSR. Pout v XXI vek (The Jews in the USSR. Entry into the 21st
Century), Strana i mir: Obschetv. Polititcheski, ekonomitcheski i koultournofilosfski journal
(The Country and the World: Sociopolitical, Economic, Cultural and Philosophical
Review), Munich, 1989, no. 1 (49), p. 70.
1033Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 145.
1034M.A. Krol, Stranitsy moe jizni (Pages of my life), t. 1, New York, Union of Russian Jews
in New York, 1944, p. 267.
1035Krol., op. cit., pp. 260261, 267, 299.
of them will be called upon to determine to a large extent the destinies of our
land throughout the twentieth century.
At the time, the Jews of Russia envisaged at least six possible orientations,
however incompatible with each other. Namely:

the safeguard of their religious identity by isolation, as had been practised for
centuries (but this path became more and more unpopular);
assimilation;
the struggle for national and cultural autonomy, the active presence of
Judaism in Russia as a distinct element;
emigration;
adherence to Zionism;
adherence to the revolution.

Indeed, the proponents of these different tendencies were often united in the
work of acculturation of the Jewish masses in three languagesHebrew,
Yiddish and Russianand in welfare worksin the spirit of the theory of
small gestures in vogue in Russia in the 80s.
Mutual aid was embodied in Jewish associations, some of which, after the
revolution, were able to continue their action in emigration. This was the case
with the Society for the Dissemination of Education among the Jews of Russia,
which had been founded in 1863. By the mid-90s, this Society was already
opening its own schools, with, besides an education in Russian, courses in
Hebrew. It convened PanRussian conferences on the theme of Jewish popular
education.1036
In 1891 began the works of a Commission of Jewish History and
Ethnography, which in 1908 became the Society of Jewish History and
Ethnography. It coordinated the study of Jewish history through Russia and the
collection of archives.1037
In 1880, the King of the Railways, Samuel Poliakov, founded the Society
of Craft and Agricultural Labour among the Jews (SCAL). The latter collected a
good deal of money and devoted the bulk of its efforts, at the beginning of its
efforts, to the transfer of Jewish artisans outside the Pale of Settlement to the
central provinces.1038 We have seen that after the initial authorisation given (in
1865) to this transfer the craftsmen moved only in small numbers. What
happened after the pogroms of 18811882? We could think: now, they will
certainly leave, they have the help the SCAL, plus a subsidy from the
government for the displacement, they will not remain there, moping around,
confined in this damned Pale where one was condemned to a wretched death,
1036JE, t. 1, pp. 6061.
1037Ibidem, t. 8, p. 466.
1038Ibidem, t. 11, p. 924.
but no: after more than ten years of efforts on the part of the SCAL, only 170
artisans moved! The SCAL decided then to help artisans inside the Pale by
purchasing tools, setting up workshops and then creating professional
schools.1039
Emigration was taken over by the Society for Colonisation by the Jews
(SCJ), whose creation followed the opposite course: first abroad, then in Russia.
It was founded in London in 1891 by Baron Moritz von Hirsch, who for this
purpose made a donation of 2,000,000 pounds sterling. His idea was the
following: to substitute the chaotic emigration of the Jews of Eastern Europe
with a wellordered colonisation, oriented towards the countries requiring
cultivators, and thus to bring back at least part of the Jews to the cultivation of
the land, to free them from this anomaly which arouses the animosity of the
European peoples.1040 To seek for the Jews who leave Russia a new
homeland and try to divert them from their usual activity, trade, make them
farmers and thereby contribute to the work of rebirth of the Jewish people. 1041
This new homeland, it would be Argentina. (Another objective was to divert the
wave of Jewish immigration away from the shores of the United States where,
owing to the influx of immigrants, the wage decline induced by their
competition, there rose the spectre of antiSemitism.) As it was proposed to
populate this land with Jews of Russia, an office of the Society for Colonisation
opened in Saint Petersburg in 1892. It set up 450 information offices and 20
neighbourhood committees. They received the candidates for emigration to help
them obtain their exit papers from the territory, they negotiated with the
maritime messengers, they procured travellers with tickets at reduced prices,
they published brochures on countries likely to welcome new settlers.1042
(Sliosberg denounces in passing the fact that no person not holding a double
title as a banker or a millionaire had access to their direction.1043)
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the emigration of Jews from Russia
had been growing steadily for various reasons, some of which have already been
mentioned here. One of the most serious of these was the compulsory
conscription: if so many young men (it is Denikin who writes it) chose to
mutilate themselves, was it not better to emigrate? Especially when we know
that conscription simply did not exist in the United States! (The Jewish authors
are silent on this motif, and the Jewish Encyclopdia itself, in the article The
Emigration of the Jews of Russia, does not say a single word of it. 1044 It is true
that this reason does not explain on its own the emigration boom in the 90s.)
Another reason, also of significance: the Provisional Regulations of 1882. The
third major shock was the expulsion of Jewish craftsmen from Moscow in 1891.
And also this other, very violent: the establishment of the state monopoly on
1039Ibidem, pp. 924925.
1040Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 32, 96102.
1041JE, t. 7, p. 504.
1042SJE, t. 2, p. 365.
1043Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 29, 98100.
1044JE, t. 16, pp. 264268.
spirits in Russia in 1896, which deprived all the tenants of drinking places of
their income and reduced the revenues of the distillers. (Sliosberg: those who
had been expelled from the villages or provinces of the interior were volunteers
for emigration.) G. Aronson notes that in the 80s an average of 15,000 Jews
emigrated each year, and that they were up to 30,000 in the 90s.1045
The attitude of the Russian authorities in the face of this growing
emigrationa genuine boon to the Statewas benevolent. The Russian
Government readily agreed to the establishment of the SCJ in Saint Petersburg,
and the measures that it adopted to promote emigration; it did not interfere in
any of its actions, authorising the age group of the conscripts to emigrate with
their families; it issued free exit visas and granted special rates on trainson
one condition, however: once gone, the emigrants were never to return to
Russia again.1046
To cross the ocean, it was necessary at the time to pass through England,
which meant that in the English port cities there was provisionally a crowd of
Jewish emigrantssome of whom remained and settled in Great Britain while
others returned there after an attempt to settle in the United States. As early as
1890, English public opinion rebelled against the policy of the Russian
government: The Jewish question is constantly occupying the columns of the
British newspapers In America, too, the question of the situation of Jews in
Russia remains day after day of actuality.1047 Having assessed the proportions
that this migratory flow was likely to take, Great Britain soon closed its
doors.1048
The immigration to Argentina had also stopped in 1894. The Jewish
Encyclopdia described this as a brooding crisis in the Argentine
question.1049 Sliosberg spoke of the disenchantment of immigrants in
Argentina (the disgruntled rebelled and sent collective petitions to the
administration of Baron Hirsch). The Duma debates highlighted a situation
similar to the experience in New Russia: Immigration to Argentina provides
examples that confirm that in many cases people have received land on very
advantageous terms, but have abandoned it to engage in other trades more in
line with their abilities.1050
After this, although its vocation remained in the principle of pushing the
Jews to become farming settlers, the Society for Colonisation renounced this
objective. It set itself the task of helping the excessively disorderly emigration
of Jews from Russia, it was concerned with providing information to the

1045G. I. Aronson, V borbe za natsionalnye i granjdanskie prava: Obschestvennye telchnia v

rousskom evreistve (In the struggle for civil and national rights: Social currents among the
Jews of Russia), BJWR-1, p. 212.
1046JE, t. 7, p. 507; Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 3441; SJE, t. 7, p. 366.
1047Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 2730.
1048JE, t. 2, pp. 534535.
1049Ibidem, t. 7, p. 504.
1050Gosudarslvcnnaia DumaVtoroi sozyv (State Duma, 2nd Legislature), Stenogramme,
Session 2, Saint Petersburg, 1907, Meeting 24, 9 April 1907, p. 1814.
emigrants, defending their interests, being the connection with host countries,
and it had to modify its statutes, which had been bequeathed by Baron Hirsch.
Large sums were allocated to raise the standard of living of Jews in their places
of residence; from 1898 onwards, action was taken among the population
within Russia itself, and in the existing Jewish agricultural colonies the
introduction of more modern tools and methods of cultivation, the granting
of an advantageous credit for the improvement of the soil. However, again,
despite the large sums invested in this sector, agricultural activity remained
relatively stagnant.1051 Conversely, migratory flows outside Russia continued to
increase, in direct connection with the craft crisis and the gradual elimination
of small trade and factories; this flow reached its peak in 1906, but was
not able to absorb the annual surplus of the population of the Jews. It should
be noted that the great mass of emigrants was destined for the United States
for example, in 1910, they were 73%.1052 From 1881 to 1914, 78.6% of
emigrants from Russia landed in the United States.1053 From this period, we can
thus see what will be the general movement of our century. (Note that at the
entrance to the American territory no paper certifying craftsmanship was
required, and it followed that during the first six years of the century 63% of
Russian immigrants engaged in industry. This meant that those who left
Russia for America were exclusively artisans? This could offer an explanation
to the question as to why the artisans did not go to the Central provinces, which
were now open to them? But it is also necessary to consider that for many
immigrants, and especially for those who had neither resources nor trade, no
other answer was possible than that of recognising themselves as part of the
category notoriously well accepted by the Americans.1054)
One is struck by how few of the emigrants are the individuals belonging to
the cultivated stratum, the one allegedly the most persecuted in Russia. These
people did not emigrate. From 1899 to 1907, they were barely 1% to do so. 1055
The Jewish intelligentsia did not in any way tend to emigrate: it was, in its eyes,
a way of escaping the problems and fate of Russia at the very moment when
opportunities for action were opening up. As late as 1882, the resolution of a
Congress of Jewish public figures called for a definite rejection of the idea of
organising an emigration, for this idea contradicts the dignity of the Russian
State.1056 In the last years of the nineteenth century, the new generation wanted
to be actively involved in history and across the board, from the outside as
well as from the inside, it has gone from defensive to offensive Young Jews
now want to write their own history, to affix the seal of their will to their

1051JE, t. 7, p. 505509; I. M. Troilsky, Samodeiatelnost i samopomosch evreiev v Rossii

(autonomous activity and mutual assistance of Jews in Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 491495.
1052JE, t. 16, p. 265.
1053SJE, t. 7, p. 366.
1054JE, t. 2, pp. 246248.
1055Ibidem, pp. 247248.
1056SJE, t. 7, p. 365.
destiny, and also, to a just extent, on the destiny of the country in which they
live.1057
The religious wing of Russian Judaism also denounced emigration,
considering it as a break with the vivifying roots of East European Judaism.
The secular efforts of the new generation were primarily concerned with a
vast program of specifically Jewish instruction, culture and literature in Yiddish,
the only ones capable of creating a link with the mass of the people. (According
to the census of 1897, only 3% of Russian Jews recognised Russian as their
mother tongue, while Hebrew seemed forgotten and no one thought it could be
reborn.) It was proposed to create a network of libraries specially designed for
Jews, newspapers in Yiddish (the daily Der Freynd appeared in 1903; and it
sold like hot cakes in the villages; not belonging to any political party, it
nevertheless sought to give political training1058). It was in the 90s that took
shape the grandiose metamorphosis of the amorphous Jewish mass into a
nation, the Jewish Renaissance.1059
One after the other, authors writing in Yiddish became very popular:
Mendele MocherSefarim, ScholomAleichem, ItzhakLeibush Peretz. And the
poet Bialik, to follow the movement, translated his own poems into Yiddish. In
1908, this trend reached its peak at the Tchernovtsy Conference, which
proclaimed Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish people and
advocated the translation of all printed texts into Yiddish.1060
At the same time, considerable efforts were made for Jewish culture in the
Russian language. Thus the ten volumes of the Jewish Library, of historical and
literary content1061; the Petersburg magazines born from 1881, Rassvet (The
Dawn), then Rousski Evrei (The Russian Jew). (They soon stopped
appearing: these publications did not meet the support of the Jewish public
itself1062). The magazine Voskhod (The Break of Day) opened its pages to all
Jewish authors, translating all the novelties, offering a place of choice for
studies on Jewish history,1063 (May we, Russians, show the same interest in our
own history!). For the time being, the dominant role in the public life of
Russian Judaism was held by the Jewish Petersburg: towards the middle of
the 90s, [it is in Petersburg that] almost all senior management was formed, the
Jewish intellectual aristocracy; all the talents are in Petersburg.1064 According to
an approximate calculation, only 67,000 Jews spoke Russian fluently in 1897,
but it was the cultivated elite. And already the whole younger generation in
1057V. Jabotinsky, Vvedenie (Preface to K. N. Bialik, Pesni i poemy (Songs and poems), Saint
Petersburg, ed. Zaltsman, 1914, p. 36
1058I. Mark, Literatoura na idish v Rossii (Literature in Yiddish in Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 537
539.
1059Aronson, op. cit., BJWR-1, p. 216.
1060Mark, LJE-1, pp. 519541.
1061G. I. Aronson, Rousskoevreiskaa pclchat (The RussianJewish Press), BJWR-1, p. 563.
1062Sliosberg, t. 1, pp. 105, 260.
1063Aronson, The RussianJewish Press, op. cit., pp. 563568.
1064S. M. Ginzburg, O rousskoevrcisko intelligentsii (De lintelligentsia russojuive), JW-1.
pp. 3536.
Ukraine in the 90s was raised in Russian, and those who went to study in the
high schools completely lost contact with Jewish education.1065
There was not, strictly speaking, a slogan of the type: Assimilation! We
must blend into the Russian element! Nor an appeal to renounce ones
nationality. Assimilation was a commonplace phenomenon, but it created a link
between Russian Judaism and the future of Russia.1066 Moreover, Sliosberg
refutes the term assimilation: Nothing was more opposed to the truth than to
say that assimilated persons considered themselves Russians under the
Mosaic Law. On the contrary, the appetite for Russian culture did not exclude
confessing the traditions of Hebrew culture.1067 However, after the
disillusionment of the 80s, certain Jewish intellectuals, deeply imbued with the
idea of assimilation, felt a break in their conception of public life. 1068 Soon,
there soon was only one Jewish organisation left, one party defending
assimilation. However while it had given up arms as a theory, it remained a
very real part of the life of the Jews of Russia, at least among those who lived in
the big cities.1069 But it was decided to break the link between emancipation
and assimilationin other words: to obtain one and not the other, to gain
equality but without the loss of Jewishness. 1070 In the 90s, Voskhods primary
objective was to fight for the equal rights of Jews in Russia.1071
A Defence Office for the Jews of Russia had been formed in Saint
Petersburg at the beginning of the century, the members of which were eminent
advocates and men of letters. (Before them, Baron Hirsch had been the only one
to work as they did: it was to him that all the grievances of the Jews went.)
Sliosberg speaks to us in detail about its founders.1072
During those years, the Jewish spirit awoke for the struggle, the Jews
were assisted to a strong thrust of their selfconsciousness, public and
nationalbut a conscience now devoid of any religious form: The villages
deserted by the most fortunate, the villages abandoned by the young people,
gone to join the city, the galloping urbanisation undermined the religion in
broad sections of the Jewish population from the 90s, and caused the authority
of the rabbis to fall. The scholars of the Talmudic schools themselves were
seduced by secularisation.1073 (That being said, the biographical notes of the
Jewish Encyclopdia concerning the generation that grew up at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries often include the words received a
traditional religious education.)
1065I. BenTvi, Iz istorii rabotchego sionizma v Rossii (About the History of Workers Zionism
in Russia). BJWR-1, p. 272.
1066Ginzburg, About RussianJewish Intelligentsia, op. cit., pp. 3739
1067Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 301302.
1068Hessen, t. 2, p. 232.
1069JE, t. 3, p. 232.
1070I. Mark, Pamiati I. M. Tcherkover (To the Memory of I. M. Tcherkover), JW-2, New York,
1944, p. 425.
1071Aronson, The RussianJewish Press, op. cit., pp. 564568.
1072Sliosberg, L 3, pp. 110135.
1073Aronson, The RussianJewish Press, op. cit., pp. 213215.
 On the other hand, as we have pointed out, what developed with
unpredictable force and in an unexpected form was palestinophilia.

The events in Russia could not but be perceived by the Jews of Russia and by
the Russians involved in public life in the light of what was happening at the
same time in Europe: contacts were then free and frequent between educated
people and the borders were permeable to ideas and events.
European historians point to a nineteenthcentury antiSemitism a
growing animosity towards Jews in Western Europe, where, however, it seemed
that we were making great strides towards its disappearance. 1074 Up to
Switzerland where the Jews, in the middle of the century, had not been able to
obtain freedom of residence in the townships, the freedom to trade or to
exercise handicrafts. In France, it was the blast of the Dreyfus Affair. In
Hungary, the old landed aristocracy accused the Jews of having ruined it;
In Austria and in the presentday Czech Republic, at the end of the nineteenth
century, an antiSemitic movement was spreading, and the petty
bourgeoisie fought the socialdemocratic proletariat with antiJewish
slogans.1075 In 1898, bloody pogroms took place in Galicia. The rise in all
countries of the bourgeoisie increased the influence of the Jews, grouped in
large numbers in capitals and industrial centres In cities such as Vienna and
Budapest, the press, the theatre, the bar, the medical profession, found in their
ranks a percentage of Jews much higher than their proportion in the population
as a whole. Those years mark the beginning of the great fortunes of certain
Jewish merchants and bankers.1076
But it was in Germany that the antiJewish tendencies manifested
themselves with the greatest insistence. Let us first name Richard Wagner (as
early as 1869). In the 70s conservative and clerical circles demanded that the
rights of German Jews should be restricted and that any new Jewish
immigration should be banned. From the end of the 70s, the intellectual circles
themselves, whose spokesman was the Prussian historian Heinrich von
Treitschke, said: The agitators of today have well perceived the mindset of
society which regards the Jews as our national misfortune; The Jews never
succeed in merging with the peoples of Western Europe, and show hatred
towards Germanism. Then comes Karl Eugen Duhring, made famous for his
polemic with Marx and Engels1077: The Jewish question is a simple matter of
race, and the Jews are a race that is not only foreign but irremediably and
1074Parks, p. 161.
1075Istoria XIX veka v 8-mi t. (Russian translation of the History of the XIX century in 8
volumes, by Lavisse and Rambaud, t. 7), M., 139, pp. 186, 203.
1076Parks, p. 164.
1077Karl Eugen Dhring (18331921): German philosopher. His theses, opposed to the
economic and social theories of Marx and Engels, were strongly criticised by the latter in
the work entitled precisely the AntiDhring.
ontologically bad. Then comes the philosopher Edward Hartman. In the
political sphere, this movement led to the first international antiJewish
congress of 1882 (in Dresden), which adopted the Manifesto addressed to the
Christian peoples and governments that are dying of Judaism, and demanded
the expulsion of Jews from Germany.But in the early 90s the antiJewish
parties had regressed and suffered a series of setbacks on the political scene.1078
France was also the scene if not of the emergence of an equally aggressive
racial theory, at least of a broad antiJewish political propaganda: the one
broadcast by Edouard Drumont in his Libre Parole from 1892. Then came a
real competition between Socialism and antiSemitism; The Socialists did not
hesitate to embellish their speeches of outputs against the Jews and to lower
themselves right up to antiSemitic demagogy A social antiSemitic fog
enveloped the entirety of France.1079 (Very similar to the propaganda of the
populists in Russia in the years 18811882.) And it was then that in 1894 the
thunderous Dreyfus Affair broke out. In 1898, it [antiSemitism] reached its
climax throughout Western Europein Germany, France, Great Britain and the
United States.1080
The Russian press of the years 18701890 also issued some antiJewish
statements, but without the strong theoretical colouring they had in Germany,
nor the exacerbated social violence in AustriaHungary and France. Let us recall
the accounts of Vsevolod Krestovsky (Egyptian Darkness, among others) and
some crude newspaper articles.
It is appropriate to set apart the newspaper Novoe Vremia (The New
Times), which owed its success to its engaged positions to the Slav
movement linked to the RussoTurkish war for the defence of the Balkans. But
when from the theatre of operations were received reports on acts of plunder
perpetrated by intendants and suppliers, these suppliers of Jewish origin
appeared as the incarnation of all Russian Judaism, and Novoe Vremia adopted
a frankly antiSemitic stance. Beginning in the 80s, the newspaper did more
than go into the camp of reactionaries, it went beyond all the limits of hatred
and improbity in the Jewish question. The warning cry Beware the Jew!
resounded for the first time in the columns of Novoe Vremia. The paper insisted
on the need to take firm measures against the Jews stranglehold over Russian
science, literature and art It did not miss an opportunity to denounce the fact
of withdrawing from military service.1081
These attacks on Jews, both abroad and in Russia, stirred Vladimir
Solovyov, and in 1884 he vigorously criticised them: The Judaeans have
always behaved to us in the manner of the Judaeans, and we, Christians, have
not yet learned to behave with Judaism in a Christian way; With regard to
Judaism, the Christian world in its mass has so far shown only an irrational
1078JE*, t. 2, pp. 696708.
1079Ibidem, pp. 676677.
1080R. Noudelman, Prizrak brodit po Evrope (A Spectre Haunts Europe), in 22, TelAviv,
1992, no. 84, p. 128.
1081JE, t. 11, p. 758759.
jealousy or a feeble indifference. No, it is not Christian Europe that is tolerant
of Jews, it is the Europe of unbelievers.1082
The growing importance of the Jewish question for Russia, Russian society
understood it only half a century behind its government. It was only after the
Crimean War that the emerging Russian public opinion began to conceive the
existence of a Jewish problem in Russia. 1083 But there needed to elapse a few
more decades before it understood the primacy of this question. Providence
has brought the greatest part of the Jewish people to our country, and the
strongest, wrote Vladimir Solovyov in 1891.1084
The year before, with the support of some sympathisers, Solovyov wrote a
Protest in which it was said that the sole cause of the socalled Jewish
question was the abandonment of all righteousness and humanity, a senseless
craze for blind national egoism. To stir up racial and religious hatred, which is
so contrary to the spirit of Christianity, deeply perverts society and can lead
to a return to barbarism We must strongly denounce the antiSemitic
movement, even if only through the instinct of national survival.1085
According to the account given to him by M. Doubnov, Solovyov collected
more than a hundred signatures, including those of Tolstoy and Korolenko 1086.
But the editors of all the newspapers had been ordered not to publish this
protest. Solovyov wrote a scalding letter to Tsar Alexander III, but was told that
if he persisted, he would be punished with an administrative measure. He gave
up.1087
Just as in Europe, the multifaceted thrust of Jewish ambitions could not fail
to arouse anxiety among the actors of Russian public life here, a fierce
opposition there, and there again, on the contrary, sympathy. And, in some, a
political calculation. Like the Will of the People in 1881, who understood the
profit to be drawn from the Jewish question (at the time, it was in the direction
of persecution), the radical and liberal circles of the time, namely the left wing
of society, conceived and made theirs for a long time still the idea that the
Jewish question could be used as a political map of the struggle against the
1082V. S. Solovyov, Evreistvo i khristianski vopros (Judaism and the Christian Question),
Compl. Works in 10 vols., 2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 19111914, vol. 4, pp. 135, 136, 138.
1083Aronson, The RussianJewish Press, op. cit., p. 549.
1084Letter from V. Solovyov to F. Hetz, in V. S. Solovyov. Evreiski voprosKhristianski
vopros / Sobranie statei (The Jewish questionThe Christian questionCollection of
articles), Warsaw, Pravda, 1906. p. 34.
1085Neopoublikovannyi protest protiv antisemitizma (Protest against antiSemitism,
unpublished [edited by Vladimir Solovyov]), BJWR-1, pp. 574575. The text of this
protest was originally published in the book by F. Hetz, Ob otnoshenii V. Solovyova k
evreiskomou voprosou (V. Solovyovs attitude towards the Jewish question) (M., 1920),
where it figures under the title Ob antisemititcheskom dvijenii v petchati: Neizdannaa
statia V. Solovyova (On the antiSemitic movement in the press: an unpublished article by
V. Solovyov), then it was reprinted in the free brochure of Warsaw quoted above.
1086Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (18531921) famous Russian writer, great democrat.
A political exile, he spent ten years in Eastern Siberia. Denounces police violence and anti
Semitism. Will be horrified by the terror and despotism of the Bolsheviks.
1087Cf. BJWR-1*, p. 565.
autocracy: it was necessary to repeat over and over that the only way to obtain
equality in rights for the Jews was the definitive overthrow of the power of the
tsars. From the Liberals to the Bolsheviks. Passing by the S.R., all have never
ceased to involve the Jewssome with real sympathyto use them as a
convenient asset in the antimonarchical combat. This asset, the revolutionaries
never let it go, they exploited it without the least scruple until 1917.
However, these various tendencies and debates in the newspapers did not
affect the attitude of the people towards the Jews in Greater Russia. Many
testimonies confirm this.
Thus J. Teitel, a man who lived for a long time in deep Russia and
frequented common people, affirms that any racial or national hostility is
foreign to the common people.1088 Or, in memoires left by the Viazemsky
princes, this episode: there was at Korobovka Hospital, a district of Ousmansky,
a somewhat inconsiderate Russian physician, Doctor Smirnov; the peasants did
not like him, and his successor, the devoted Doctor Szafran, immediately
benefited from the affection and gratitude of all the peasants in the
neighbourhood. Another confirmation, inspired by the experience of the
prisoners of the years 18801890: P. F. IakoubovitchMelchine writes: It
would be an ungrateful task to seek, even in the scum of our people, the least
trace of antiSemitism.1089 And it was indeed because they sensed this that the
Jews of a small town in Belarus addressed a telegram at the beginning of the
twentieth century to Madam F. Morozova, the wife of a wealthy merchant, who
was in charge of charity: Give us this much. The synagogue burned down. You
know we have the same God. And she sent the sum requested.
Deep down, neither the Russian liberal press nor the Jewish press have ever
accused the Russian people of any landbased antiSemitism. What both of
them repeated relentlessly was that antiSemitism in the popular mass, had been
completely fabricated and fuelled by the government. The very formula
Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality was felt in Jewish circles as a formula
directed against the Jews.
In the middle of the twentieth century, we can read from a Jewish writer:
In tsarist Russia, antiSemitism had no deep roots among the people In the
broad masses of the people, there was practically no antiSemitism; moreover,
the very question of relations with Judaism did not arise It was only in certain
parts of what was called the Pale of Settlement, and mainly in Ukraine since the
time of Polish domination, that, due to certain circumstances on which there is
no need to dwell here, a certain tendency towards antiSemitism manifested
itself in the peasantry,1090 that is perfectly true. And one could add: Bessarabia.
(One can judge of the antiquity of these feelings and circumstances by reading

1088Teitel, p. 176.
1089JE, t. 10, p. 827.
1090S. M. Schwartz, Antisemitizm v Sovetskom Soiouze (AntiSemitism in the Soviet Union),
New York, ed. Chekhov, 1952, p. 13.
Karamzin1091: the Cossacks who surrounded the False Dmitry1092of the
Cossacks of the Don, obviouslytreated the Russians of Jidy (Jews)1093, which
means that in the western provinces this word was an insult.)
And what about Russian folklore? The Dahl dictionary encompasses Great
Russia, and the western provinces, and Ukraine. Editions before the revolution
contain a large number of words and expressions formed on the root jid
(Judeo). (Significant detail: in the Soviet edition of 1955, the entire typography
of the page containing these words was revised 1094, and the whole lexical
niche between jidkii and jigalo has been entirely suppressed.) However,
amongst these expressions quoted by Dahl, there are some which are inherited
from the Slavonic Church where the word jid was by no means pejorative: it
was the name of a people. There are also some that come from Polish and post
Polish practice within the Pale of Settlement. Still others were introduced into
the language at the time of the Troubles, in the seventeenth century, at a time
when, in Greater Russia, there was almost no contact with the Jews. These
inheritances are also reflected in the dicta that Dahl mentions in their Russian
formbut we can guess under the latter the southern form. (And, what is
certain is that they did not leave the bowels of the Ministry of the Interior! )
And then, let us compare these sayings with others: oh how the people
created malicious adages against the Orthodox clergy! Not one, almost, is
favourable to it!
A witness of Mariupol1095 (and he is not the only one, it is a wellknown
fact) tells us that among them, before the revolution, there was a clear
distinction between the two words evrei (Hebrew) and jid (Jew). The Evrei was
a lawabiding citizen, whose morals, conduct, and behaviour towards others did
not differ in any way from the surrounding environment. While the Jid was the
jivoder (the swindler). And it was not uncommon to hear: Im not a Jid, Im an
honest Evrei, I do not intend to dupe you. (Such words put into the mouths of
Jews, we find them in literature, and we have also read them in the pamphlets of
the populists.)
This semantic differentiation, we must never lose sight of it when
interpreting sayings.
All this is the trace of an old national quarrel on the territory of the West
and Southwest.

1091Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (17661826): Russian writer. His great History of the
Russian State made Pushkin say of him that he was the Christopher Columbus of Ancient
Russia.
1092The FalseDmitry, said the Usurper: in 1601, this character appeared in Poland pretending
to be the son of Ivan IV. He marched on Moscow and occupied the throne from 1905 to
1906. He was killed by conspirator boyars.
1093N. M. Karamzin, Istoria Gosudarsva Rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State), 12 vols., 5
ed., Saint Petersburg, Einerling, 18421844, t. 11, p. 143.
1094Dahl, Toljovyi slovar jivogo velokorousskogo iazyka (Dictionary of the living Great
Russian language), t. 1, 1955, p. 541.
1095I. E. Temirov, Vospominania (Souvenirs), BFRZ, f. 1, A-29, p. 23.
 For neither in Central Russia nor in the North and East, not even during the
general shock of October 1905, there werent any antiJewish pogroms (if there
was indignation, it was against the revolutionary intellectuals in general, against
their jubilation and ridicule of the Manifesto of October 17th). But this does not
prevent, in the eyes of the whole world, the prerevolutionary Russianot the
empire, but Russiato bear forever the seal of infamy, that of the pogroms and
the Black Hundreds. And it is indelible, encrusted in minds for yet how many
centuries to come?
The antiJewish pogroms have always and exclusively broken out in South
Western Russiaas it was the case in 1881. And the Kichinev pogrom of 1903
was of the same nature.

Let us not forget that at the time the population of Bessarabia was largely
illiterate, that in Kishinev there were 50,000 Jews, 50,000 Moldovans, 8,000
Russians (in fact, mainly Ukrainians, but the difference was not noted) and a
few thousand others. What were the main forces responsible for the pogroms?
The delinquents of the pogroms were mainly Moldovans.1096
The Kishinev pogrom began on April 6, the last day of the Jewish Passover
and the first day of the Orthodox Passover. (This is not the first time we have
observed this tragic link between antiJewish pogroms and the Passover of
Christians: in 1881, 1882, and 1899 in Nikolaev1097and it fills us with extreme
pain and anxiety.)
Let us use the one document that is based on a rigorous investigation
carried out right after the events. This is the indictment issued by the local court
prosecutor, V. N. Goremykine, who did not call a single Jew as an accused, for
which he was harshly vilified by the reactionary press.1098 (As we shall see, the
court first sat in closed session to not exacerbate the passions, and the
indictment was originally published abroad in the emigrated press organ of
Stuttgart Osvobojdenie [Release].1099)
The document begins with an account of the usual clashes between Jews
and Christians as happened in recent years at Easter and the animosity of the
local population towards the Jews. It says that two weeks before the
Passover rumours circulated in the city, announcing that there would be,
during future holidays, aggressions against the Jews. A newspaper, the
Bessarabets (the Bessarabian), had played a role of blaster in publishing day
after day, throughout the last few weeks, incendiary articles, strongly anti
Jewish, which did not go unnoticed among small clerks, pencilpushers, the
1096SJE, t. 4, p. 327.
1097L. Praisman, Pogromy i samooborona (Pogroms and selfdefense), in 22, 19861987,
no. 51, p. 176.
1098JE, t. 9, p. 507.
1099Kichinevski pogrom: Obvinitelnyi akt (The Kichinev pogrom: the indictment),
Osvobojdenie, Stuttgart, Oct. 19, 1903, no. 9 (33), supplement, pp. 14.
entire little people of Bessarabia. Among the last provocative articles in the
newspaper was the one about the murder of a Christian child in the village of
Doubossary, allegedly carried out by Jews for ritual purposes (and another
rumour ran that a Jew had murdered his Christian servant when she had actually
committed suicide1100).
And the police of Kishinev, what did it do? Did not give any particular
consideration to the rumours, and despite the fact that in recent years there
has been regular fighting between Jews and Christians, the Kishinev police did
not take any serious preventive measures, it only reinforced the patrols for the
holidays, in the places where the crowd was going to be the densest, by adding
men recruited from the local garrison.1101 The chief of police gave no clear
instruction to his officers.
This is clearly the most unpardonable: repeated brawls every year for the
Passover, rumours of such a contentand the police fold their arms. One more
sign of the state of decline of the governmental machinery. For there are two
things, one: either we let go of the empire (how many wars, how many efforts
have been made to unite, for obscure reasons, Moldavia with Russia), or we
safeguard the good order which must reign over its entire territory.
On the afternoon of April 6, the streets of the city is invaded by people in
celebration, with many teenagers wandering among the crowd, as well as
angry people. The boys start throwing stones at nearby Jewish houses, throwing
harder and harder, and when the commissioner and his inspectors try to arrest
one of them, they get stones in their turn. Adults then get involved. The
police took no firm measures to stop the disorders and these led to the sacking
of two Jewish shops and a few sheds. In the evening, the disorders subsided,
no assault had been perpetrated against the Jews that day; the police had
arrested sixty people during the day.
However, on the early morning of April 7, the very agitated Christian
population began to assemble in various parts of the city and in the suburbs, in
small groups which provoked Jews to clashes of increasing violence. In the
same way, from the first hour on the New Market, more than a hundred Jews
had gathered, armed with stakes and pickets, rifles even here and there, who
fired a few shots. The Christians had no firearms. The Jews said: Yesterday you
did not scatter the Russians, today we will defend ourselves. And some held
bottles of vitriol in their hands, which they threw at the Christians they met.
(Pharmacies were traditionally held by Jews.) Rumours spread throughout the
city, reporting that the Christians were being assaulted by the Jews; they swell
from mouth to mouth and exasperate the Christian population: one transforms
were beaten into were slaughtered, one carries that the Jews have sacked
the cathedral and murdered the priest. And now, in various parts of the town,

1100I. G. Froumkine, Iz istorii rousskogo evrcistva: vospominaniia, materialy, dokoumenty (On

the history of the Jews of Russia: memoires, materials, documents), BJWR-1, p. 59.
1101Kichinevski pogrom: Obvinitelnyi akt (The Kichinev pogrom: the indictment),
Osvobojdenie, op. cit., p. 1.
small groups of fifteen to twenty persons each, chiefly workmen, with teenagers
in their lead who throw stones into the windowpanes, begin to plunder the
shops, the premises, the dwellings of the Jews, smashing everything inside.
These groups are gradually enlarged by the passersby. Towards two, three
oclock in the morning, disturbances spread in a more and more extended
radius; the houses where icons or crosses have been exposed in windows are
not affected. In the sacked premises, everything was totally destroyed, the
goods ejected from the shops to be trampled or stolen by individuals who
escorted the attackers. They went so far as to sack the houses of prayer of the
Jews, and throw down the sacred scrolls [the Torah] in the street. Drinking
places, of course, were sacked; The wine was poured into the street or drunk
on the spot by the bandits.
The inertia of the police, owing to the absence of a proper command,
caused these crimes to be perpetrated with impunity, and this did not fail to
encourage and excite the evildoers. The police forces, left to their own devices,
far from uniting their efforts, acted according to their instinct and the
subordinate policemen were mostly mute spectators of the pogrom. However, a
phone call was made to the local garrison to call for reinforcements, but
whenever the soldiers went to a certain point, they could not find anybody
there, and in the absence of new instructions, they remained inactive; They
were scattered in the city in isolated groups, with no clear objective and no
coordination with each other; They only dispersed the excited crowds. (This
garrison was not the most efficient, and, moreover, it was just after Passover:
many officers and soldiers were on leave.1102) The inertia of the police
engendered new rumours, saying that the government would have allowed to
attack the Jews, since they are enemies of the countryand the pogrom,
unleashed, inebriated, became envenomed. The Jews, fearing for their
possessions and for their lives, lost all composure, fear made them go mad.
Several of them, armed with revolvers, proceeded to counterattack to defend
themselves. Ambushed on street corners, behind fences, on balconies, they
began to shoot looters, but awkwardly, without aiming at their targets, so that it
did nothing to help them and only aroused in the pogrom troublemakers a
terrible explosion of rage. The crowd of plunderers was seized with rage, and
where the shooting had resounded, it came at once to tear everything apart and
be violent towards the Jews who were there. A shot was particularly fatal to the
Jews: the man who snatched a young Russian boy, little Ostapov. From one,
two oclock in the afternoon, the blows of the Jews became more and more
violent, and by five oclock they were accompanied by a series of murders.
At halfpast three in the afternoon, Governor Von Raaben, completely
overwhelmed, passed an order to the chief of the garrison, General Bekman,
authorising the use of arms. Bekman immediately had the city canvassed, and

1102Materialy dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii (Materials for history 12 vols., 5th
ed., Saint Petersburg, Einerling, 18421844, 11, pp. 143, S. M. Dubnov and G. I. Krasnyi
Admoni, t. 1, Pg. 1919 (Materials), p. 340.
the troops, who had ventured out walked in good order from that moment on.
From that moment on, the troops were now able to carry out mass arrests, and
energetic measures were taken. At nightfall, the pogrom was under control.
The act stipulates the death toll: There were 42 deaths, including 38
Jews; all the bodies bore traces of blows by blunt objectsclubs, shovels,
stonesand some, blows of axes; almost all were wounded in the head, some
in the chest also. They had no traces of bullets, no evidence of torture or rape
either (this was confirmed by doctors expert opinions and autopsies, as well as
by the report of the MedicoLegal Department of the Central Administration of
Bessarabia); there were 456 wounded, including 62 among the Christians;
eight were wounded by bullets of the 394 Jewish wounded, only five were
seriously injured. No trace of abuse except for a oneeyed man whose healthy
eye had been ripped out threequarters of the men assaulted were adults; there
were three complaints of rape, two of which were prosecuted. Seven soldiers
were wounded, including a soldier who had his face burned with vitriol; 68
policemen received minor injuries. There were 1,350 homes ransacked, almost
a third of the houses in Kishinev: an enormous figure, the equivalent of a
bombing as for the arrests, there were 816 on the morning of April 9, and in
addition to the investigations into the murders, 664 persons appeared in court.
In some authors, the figures of the victims among the Jews differ from the
official statistics, but the gap is not very large. The Book of the Jews of Russia
estimates that there were 45 Jews killed, 86 seriously wounded, 1,500 houses
and shops looted or destroyed.1103 Biekerman puts forward the figure of 53 dead,
but maybe not all Jews.1104 The recent Jewish Encyclopdia (1988) states: 49
people were killed, 586 wounded, more than 1,500 houses and shops looted.1105
This is the official description. But we sense what is hiding behind it. We
are told: Only one person, one Jew with one eye has had the other ripped out.
We learn a little more from Korolenko in his essay Dom no 13 (House No.
13).1106 This poor man was called Meer Weisman: To my question, wrote
Korolenkodid he know who did this?, he answered with perfect serenity
that he did not know, but that a kid, the son of his neighbours, had boasted that
he had done it with a lead weight attached to a string. We see then that
perpetrators and victims knew each other rather well Korolenko resumed: It
is true that what I advance, I hold of the Jews themselves, but there is no reason
not to believe their sayings Why would they have invented these details?
And, in fact, why would the family of Bentsion Galanter, mortally hit on the
head, invent that the murderers had planted nails all over his body? Was not the
family of the Nisenson accountant sufficiently tried, why would it add that he
had been rinsed in a puddle before being massacred? These details are not
fiction.

1103Froumkine, BJWR-1, p. 59.

1104Biekerman, RJE, p. 57.
1105SJE, t. 4, p. 327.
1106V. G. Korolenko, Dom no 13, Sobr. sotch. (Complete works), t. 9, M. 1995, pp. 406422.
 But to those who were far from the events, to the agitators of public
opinion, these horrors were not enough. What they remembered was not
tragedy, misfortune, the dead, but rather: how to exploit them to strike the tsarist
power? And they resorted to terrifying exaggerations. To overcome reactions of
horror, to try to see clearly in the versions built up in the months and years
following, would it not be minimising the tragedy? And to attract many insults?
But to see it clearly is a duty, because we took advantage of the pogrom of
Kishinev to blacken Russia and mark her forever of the seal of infamy. Today,
all honest historical work on the subject demands a distinction between the
horrible truth and the treacherous lies. The conclusion of the indictment is the
following: the disorders have reached the magnitude described only because of
the inertia of the police, deprived of an adequate command The preliminary
investigation did not find evidence that the disorders had been premeditated.1107
These clues, no further investigation found them either.
But so be it: the Office for the Defence of the Jews, which we have already
mentioned, (was attended by such eminent persons as Mr. Winaver, Mr. G.
Sliosberg, Mr. Bramson, Mr. Koulicher, Mr. A. Braoudo, Mr. S. Pozner,
Krohl1108), as soon as the news of the pogrom of Kishinev reached it, it excluded
from the outset all possible causes apart from that of a conspiracy fomented
from above: Who gave the order of organising the pogrom, who took the
direction of the dark forces that perpetrated it? 1109 As soon as we learned of
the climate in which the killings of Kishinev took place, we did not doubt that
this diabolical undertaking had been concocted by the Police Department and
carried out at his command. Although, of course, the wretches kept their
project secret, wrote Krohl in the 40s of the 20th century. 1110 But, as
convinced as we are that the killings of Kishinev were premeditated in high
places, with the tacit agreement and perhaps at the initiative of Plehve, we can
unmask these highplaced assassins and expose them to the light of the world
only on one condition: if we have the most indisputable proofs against them.
That is why we decided to send the famous lawyer Zaroudny to Kishinev. 1111
He was the most suitable person for the mission we had entrusted to him, he
undertook to reveal the hidden springs of the Kishinev massacre, after which the
police, to divert attention, arrested a few dozens thieves and looters. 1112 (Recall
that in the aftermath of the pogrom, 816 people were arrested.) Zaroudny
gathered information and brought back material of exceptional importance.
That is to say that the chief person in charge, the organiser of the pogrom, had
been the head of local security, K. Lewendal, a gendarmerie officer who had
been appointed to Kishinev shortly before the pogrom. It was at his command

1107The Kichinev pogrom: The indictment, op. cit., pp. 3, 202.

1108Krohl, Stranitsy (Pages), p. 299.
1109Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 49.
1110M. Krohl, Kishinevski pogrom 1903 goda i Kishinevski pogromnyi protses (The Kichinev
pogrom of 1903 and the trial of the Kichinev pogrom), Mi-2, p. 372.
1111Ibidem, pp. 372373.
1112Krohl, Stranitsy (Pages), op. cit., pp. 301, 303.
that the police and the troops openly lent a hand to the assassins and the
looters.1113 He would have totally paralysed the action of the governor. 1114 (It
is known, however, that in Russia neither the police nor the troops were under
the orders of the Okhrana.)
This said exceptionally important material, which denounced the guilty
with absolute certainty, was never published neither at the time or later. Why?
But because, if it had been so, how could Lewendal and his accomplices escape
punishment and dishonour? This material is known only by hearsay: a dealer
named Pronine and a notary named Pissarjevsky would have been found several
times in a certain caf and, on Lewendals instructions, would have planned the
pogrom.1115 And it was after these meetings that all the police and the troops
opted for the pogrom. The prosecutor Goremykine examined the charges against
Lowendal and declared them unfounded.1116 (The journalist Kruchevane, whose
incendiary articles had really favoured the pogrom, was stabbed in Petersburg
two months later by Pinhas Dachevsky who wanted to kill him.1117)
The authorities, during this time, continued the investigation. The director
of the police department, A. A. Lopoukhine (with his liberal sympathies, he was
unsuspected in the eyes of the public) was quickly dispatched to Kishinev.
Governor Von Raaden was dismissed, along with several other senior officials
from Bessarabia; a new governor was appointed, Prince S. Urusov (soon to be a
prominent K. D., and would sign the appeal to the rebellion called Vyborgs
Appeal). A bulletin from the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, was published in
The Messenger of the Government of April 29: in it he stated his indignation at
the inaction of the authorities of Kishinev; he called on all provincial governors,
city governors and police chiefs to vigorously halt all violence by taking all
possible measures.1118
The Orthodox Church also expressed itself. The Holy Synod issued a
bulletin inviting the clergy to take measures to extirpate feelings of hostility
towards the Jews. Some of the hierarchs, notably Father John of Kronstadt, who
were very much listened to and revered by the faithful, appealed to the Christian
people, expressing their disapproval, their exhortations, their appeals for
appeasement. They have substituted for the Christian holiday a sanguinary and
satanic orgy.1119 And Bishop Antony (Krapovitsky) declared: The punishment
of God will befall the wretches who have spilled blood related to that of the
GodMan, to His pure Mother, the apostles and the prophets so that you know

1113Ibidem, pp. 301304.

1114Krohl, op. cit., Mi-2, p. 374.
1115Ibidem.
1116Report to the Prosecutor No. 1392 of 20 Nov. 1903; Report to the prosecutor No. 1437 of 1
Dec. 1903, in Materialy [Materials], op. cit., pp. 319, 322323.
1117RJE, t. 1, p. 417.
1118In Materialy [Materials], op. cit., pp. 333335; Pravitelstvennyi vestnik (Government
Messenger). Saint Petersburg, no. 97, 1903, 29 April (12 May).
1119J. de Cronstadt: My thoughts about the violence perpetrated by Christians against the Jews
in Kishinev, in Materialy [Materials], op. cit., pp. 354, 356.
how much the Divine Spirit cherishes the Jewish people, still rejected today,
and know what is His wrath against those who would want to offend Him.1120 A
text on the subject was distributed to the people. (The long exhortations and
explanations of the Church, however, were not unrelated to an archaic state of
mind, frozen for centuries and to be surpassed by the formidable evolutions in
progress.)
In the first days of May, a month after the events, an information campaign
but also one of intoxication about the pogrom broke out in the Russian press as
well as in the European and American ones. In Petersburg, fanatical articles
spoke of assassinations of mothers and infants, of rapesometimes of underage
girls, sometimes of women under the eyes of their husbands or of their father
and mother; there was talk of torn tongues; a man was ripped open, a womans
head was pierced with nails driven in by the nostrils. 1121 Less than a week had
elapsed when these horrifying details appeared in the papers of the West.
Western public opinion gave it full credence. The influential Jews in England
relied on these fabrications and included them word for word in their public
protest.1122 Should we repeat: No evidence of abuse or rape was observed on
the bodies. Due to a new wave of newspaper articles, forensic pathologists
were asked to submit supplementary reports. The doctor of the City Health
Service, named Frenkel (who had examined the bodies in the Jewish cemetery),
and another named Tchorba (who had received the dead and wounded at the
hospital in the Kishinev Zemstvo between 5 P.M., the second day after the
Passover, and noon, the third day, and then at the Jewish hospital), and the
doctor Vassiliev (who had carried out an autopsy of thirtyfive corpses)all
attested the absence of traces of torture or violence on the bodies described in
the newspapers.1123 It was later learned at the trial that doctor Dorochevskythe
one who, it was thought, had supplied these frightening reportshad seen
nothing of these atrocities, and declined any responsibility for the publication of
the tabloids.1124 As for the prosecutor at the Criminal Chamber of Odessa, he
had, in reply to a question from Lopoukhine regarding the rapes, secretly
conducted his own investigation: the accounts of the families of the victims
themselves did not confirm any case of rape; the concrete cases, in the
expertise, are positively excluded.1125 But who paid attention to the
examinations and conclusions of doctors? Who cares about the prosecutors
specific research? All these documents may remain, turning yellow, in cabinets
files!

1120Homily of Bishop Antoine of 30 April 1903, in Materialy [Materials], op. cit., pp. 354,
356.
1121SanktPetersburgskie vedomosti (News from Saint Petersburg), 24 April (7 May 1903), p.
5.
1122Baltimore Sun, 16 May 1903, p. 2; The Jewish Chronicle, 15 May 1903, p. 2; Protest by
the Board of Deputies and the AngloJewish Association, Times, 18 May 1903, p. 10.
1123In Materialy [Materials], op. cit., pp. 174175.
1124Ibidem, p. 279.
1125Ibidem, pp. 172173.
 All that the witnesses had not confirmed, all that Korolenko had not
related, the authorities did not have the presence of mind to refute it. And all
these details spread throughout the world, and took the form of a fact in public
opinion, which they were to remain throughout the twentieth century, and which
they will probably still be throughout the whole of the twentyfirst century
cold, frozen, stowed forever in the name of Russia.
However, Russia, for many years now, but with increasing acuteness, knew
a mad, deadly distortion between civil society and the government. It was a
struggle to the death: for the liberal and radical circles, and even more so for the
revolutionaries, any incident (true or false) discrediting the government was a
blessing, and for them everything was permittedany exaggeration, any
distortion, any makeup of facts; the important thing was to humiliate power as
severely as possible. For the Russian radicals, a pogrom of this gravity was a
chance in their fight!
The government resolved to forbid all publication in the newspapers
concerning the pogrom, but it was a blunder, for the rumours were reechoed
with greater force by the European and American press; All the rantings
escalated with even more impunityexactly as if there had never been any
police report.
And here it was, the great offensive launched against the government of the
tsar. The Bureau for the Defence of the Jews sent telegrams to all the capitals:
organise protest meetings everywhere!1126 A member of the Bureau wrote: We
have communicated the details of the atrocities in Germany, France, England,
the United States The impression that our information caused was shattering;
in Paris, Berlin, London and New York, there were protest meetings in which
the speakers painted a frightening picture of the crimes committed by the tsarist
government.1127 Here he is, they thought, the Russian bear as it has been since
the dawn of time! These atrocities shocked the world. And now, without any
restraint, the police and the soldiers have by all means assisted the assassins
and the plunderers in perpetrating their inhuman acts.1128 The cursed
autocracy has marked itself with an indelible stigma! In meetings, they
stigmatised the new plan of tsarism, premeditated by it. In the synagogues of
London, they accused the Holy Synod of having committed this killing due to
religious inspiration. Some of the hierarchs of the Catholic Church also declared
their disapproval. But it was by far the European and American press that
showed themselves as being the most virulent (notably the press tycoon William
Hearst): We accuse the tsarist power of being responsible for the massacre of
Kishinev. We declare that his guilt in this holocaust is total. It is before his door
and in front of any other that the victims of this violence are exposed. May the
God of Justice descend here below to finish with Russia as He has finished with
Sodom and Gomorrah and let him evacuate this pestilential focus from the

1126Krohl, op. cit., RW-2, pp. 376377.

1127Krohl, Stranitsy (Pages), op. cit., p. 302.
1128Krohl, op. cit., RW-2, pp. 371372.
face of the earth. The killing of Kishinev surpasses in insolent cruelty all that
has ever been recorded in any civilised nation1129 (including, one must
believe, the extermination of the Jews in medieval Europe?).
Alas, Jews more or less circumspect, more or less stunned, joined in the
same assessment of the events. And not less than thirty years after the events,
the respectable jurist G. Sliosberg retains the same details in publications of
emigration(even though he himself never went to Kishinev, then or later): the
nails planted in the head of the victim (he goes so far as attributing this
information to the account of Korolenko!), and the rapes, and the presence of
several thousand soldiers (the modest garrison of Kishinev had never seen as
many!) who seemed to be there to protect the perpetrators of the pogrom.1130
But Russia, in the field of communication, was inexperienced, unable to
justify itself coherently seeing it was still unaware of the methods used for this.
Meanwhile, the socalled cold premeditation of the pogrom was not
supported by any solid proofnone that was commensurate with the raging
campaign. And although lawyer Zaroudny had already closed his investigation
and firmly established that the chief organiser and the sponsor of the pogrom
was none other than the chief of the local Okhrana, Baron Lewendal 1131even
in this variant, the character of Lewendal did not reach the government
sufficiently, it was necessary to draw a little more to reach the central power.
But here we are!six weeks after the pogrom, in order to further stir up
general indignation, and to dishonour the key figure of power, one discovered
(no one knows by whom, but very appropriately) an ultrasecret letter from
the Minister of Interior Plehve to the governor of Kishinev, Von Raaben (not a
bulletin addressed to all the governors of the Pale of Settlement, no, but a letter
addressed to him alone ten days before the pogrom), in which the minister, in
rather evasive terms, gave advice: if serious disturbances occur in the province
of Bessarabia, not to repress them by arms, but to use only persuasion. And now
an individual, very timely there too, transmitted the text of this letter to an
English correspondent in Saint Petersburg, D. D. Braham, and the latter
hastened to publish it in London in the Times of 18 May 1903.1132
A priori: what is the weight of a single publication in a single newspaper,
which nothing corroboratesneither on the spot nor later? But it weighs as
much as you want! Enormously, even! And in this case, the publication of the
Times was supported by the protest of prominent British Jews, with Montefiore
at their head (from an internationallyknown family).1133
Thanks to the climate that reigned throughout the world, this letter was a
colossal success: the sanguinary intentions against the Jews of the universally

1129Remember Kichineff (editorial), The Jewish Chronicle, 15 May 1903, p. 21; 22 May
1903, p. 10; Baltimore Sun, 16 May 1903, p. 4.
1130Sliosberg, vol. 3, pp. 4849, 6164.
1131Ibidem.
1132Times, 18 May 1903, p. 10.
1133Protest by the Board of Deputies and the AngloJewish Association, Times, 18 May
1903, p. 10.
abhorred tsarism, which had not yet been proved, were suddenly attested with
supporting documents. Articles and meetings had a new upsurge throughout
the world. On the third day after the publication, the New York Times pointed
out that three days already that the letter was disclosedand no denial
occurred, and the British press has already declared it to be authentic. What
can we say about the level of civilisation of a country, of which a minister can
give his signature to such exactions? 1134 The Russian government, in its
awkwardness and incomprehension of the gravity of the matter, found nothing
better to do than to negligently abandon a laconic denial signed by the head of
the Police Department, A. Lopoukhine, and only on the ninth day after the
scandalous publication of the Times,1135 but instead of investigating the
falsification, he simply settled on expelling Braham from the territory.
One can argue with certainty that this was indeed a forgery, for several
reasons. Not only because Braham never exhibited any proof of the authenticity
of the letter. Not only because Lopoukhine, the declared enemy of Plehve, had
himself denied this text. Not only because Prince Urusov, the great Jewish
sympathiser who had succeeded Von Raaben and controlled the archives of the
governorate, found no letter of Plehve. Not only because poor Von Raaben,
dismissed, his life and career broken, never, in his desperate efforts to restore
his reputation, complained of having received instructions from above
which would have immediately restored his career and made him the idol of
liberal society. The main reason lies in the fact that the State archives in Russia
had nothing in common with the rigged archives of the Soviet era when any
document was concocted upon request or others burned in secret. No, in the
Russian archives everything was preserved, inviolably and forever. Immediately
after the February Revolution, an extraordinary commission of inquiry of the
Provisional Government, and, still more zealously, the Special Commission for
the Study of the History of the Pogroms, with investigators as serious as S.
Dubnov, KrasnyAdmoni, did not find the document in Petersburg or Kishinev,
nor its record it upon entrance or exit; they found only the translation into
English of Brahams English text (as well as papers containing indications of
severe punishment and dismissal sanctioning any illegal action by agents
responsible for the Jewish question).1136
After 1917, what was still to be feared? But not a single witness, not a
single memorialist, was able to tell the story of where this immortal telegram
had fallen, or to boast of having acted as an intermediary. And Braham himself
neither at the time, nor laterdidnt say a single word about it.
But this did not prevent the constitutionalDemocratic newspaper Retch
(The Word) from writing with confidence, on 19 March 1917: The bloodbath
of Kishinev, the counterrevolutionary pogroms of 1905 were organised, as was

1134New York Times, 19 May 1903, p. 10; 21 May 1903, p. 8.

1135Times, 27 May 1903, p. 7.
1136P. P. Zavarsine, Rabota taino politsii (The Work of Your Secret Police), Paris, 1924, pp.
6869.
definitively established, by the Police Department. And, in August 1917, at the
Moscow State Conference, the President of the Special Commission of Inquiry
publicly declared that he would soon present the police departments
documents concerning the organisation of antiJewish pogromsbut neither
soon nor later, neither the Commission, nor, subsequently, the Bolsheviks
exhibited any document of this kind. Thus the lie encrusted itself, practically up
to now! (In my November 16, one of the characters evokes the pogrom of
Kishinev, and in 1986 the German publisher adds an explanatory note in this
regard stating: AntiJewish Pogrom, carefully prepared, which lasted two days.
The Minister of the Interior Plehve had conjured the governor of Bessarabia, in
the event of a pogrom, not to use firearms. 1137) In the recent Jewish
Encyclopdia (1996) we read this statement: In April 1903, the new Minister
of the Interior, Plehve, organised with his agents a pogrom in Kishinev.1138
(Paradoxically, we read in the previous tome: The text of Plehves telegram
published in the Times of London is held by most scholars as being a
fake1139).
And here: the false story of the Kishinev pogrom made much more noise
than the real, cruel and authentic one. Will the point be made one day? Or will it
take yet another hundred years?
The incompetence of the tsarist government, the decrepitude of its power,
had manifested itself on various occasions, in Transcaucasia, for example,
during the killing spree between the Armenians and Azeris, but the government
was declared guilty only in the affair of Kishinev.
The Jews, wrote D. Pasmanik, have never imputed the pogrom to the
people, they have always accused the power and the administration
exclusively No facts could ever shake this opinion, a furthermore perfectly
superficial opinion.1140 And Biekerman emphasised that it was a matter of
public knowledge that pogroms were for the government a form of struggle
against the revolution. More circumspect minds reasoned thus: if in the recent
pogroms no technical preparation by the power is attested, the state of mind
which reigns in Saint Petersburg is such that any virulent judeophobe will find
among the authorities, from the minister to the last sergeant of town, a
benevolent attitude towards him. Yet the Kishinev trial, which took place in the
autumn of 1903, showed exactly the opposite.
For the liberal and radical opposition, this trial was to be transformed into a
battle against the autocracy. Were sent as civil parties eminent lawyers, Jews
and ChristiansMr. Karabchevsky, O. Gruzenberg, S. Kalmanovitch, A.
Zaroudny, N. Sokolov. The brilliant leftwing advocate P. Pereverzev and a
few others joined as defenders of the accused so that they would not be afraid
1137November sechzehn, MnchenZrich, Piper, 1986, p. 1149. French Trans., ed. Fayard,
Paris, 1985.
1138SJE, t. 7, p. 347.
1139Ibidem, t. 6, p. 533.
1140D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaa revolioutisiia i evreistvo (Bolchevisme i ioudasme) (The
Russian Revolution and Judaism [The Bolshevism and Judaism]), Paris, 1923, p. 142.
to tell the court who had prompted them to start the carnage 1141to clarify:
to say that it was the power that had armed them. The civil parties demanded
that further investigation be carried out and that the real culprits should be
placed on the stand. The authorities did not publish the transcripts so as not to
exacerbate the passions in the city of Kishinev, nor those already whitehot of
world opinion. Things were all the easier: the squad of activists who surrounded
the civil parties made their own reports and sent them through the world, via
Romania, for publication. This, however, did not modify the course of the trial.
The killers faces were scrutinized, but the culprits were undoubtedly the
authoritiesguilty only, it is true, of not having intervened in a timely manner.
At that point, the group of lawyers split a collective statement stating that if the
court refuses to bring to justice and punish the main culprits of the pogrom
that is, not some ordinary Governor Von Raaben (he no longer interested
anyone), but indeed Minister Plehve himself and the central government of
Russiathey [the defenders] will have nothing more to do in this trial. For
they encountered such hostility on the part of the court that it gave them no
possibility to defend freely and in conscience the interests of their clients, as
well as those of justice.1142 This new tactic of the lawyers, which constituted a
purely political approach, proved to be quite fertile and promising; it made a
great impression on the whole world. The action of lawyers has been approved
by all the best minds in Russia.1143
The trial before the Criminal Division of Odessa was now proceeding in
order. The prognostications of Western newspapers that the trial of Kishinev
will only be a masquerade, a parody of justice, 1144 were not confirmed in any
way. The accused, in view of their number, had to be divided into several
groups according to the gravity of the charge. As mentioned above, there were
no Jews among the accused.1145 The chief of the gendarmerie of the province
had already announced in April that out of 816 people arrested, 250 had been
dismissed for inconsistency of the charges against them, 446 had immediately
been the subject of judicial decisions (as evidenced in the Times), and persons
convicted by the court have been sentenced to the heaviest penalties; about 100
were seriously charged, including 36 accused of murder and rape (in November,
they will be 37). In December, the same chief of the gendarmerie announced the
results of the trial: deprivation of rights, property, and penal colony (seven years
or five years), deprivation of rights and disciplinary battalion (one year and one
and a half years). In all, 25 convictions and 12 acquittals. 1146 The real culprits of
real crimes had been condemned, the ones we have described. The
condemnations, however, were not tenderthe drama of Kishinev ends on a

1141Krohl, Stranitsy (Pages) op. cit., p. 303.

1142Krohl, op. cit., JW2*, pp. 379380.
1143Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 69.
1144Times, 10 November 1903, p. 4.
1145JE, t. 9, p. 507.
1146Materialy (Materials), op. cit., p. 147; Times, 18 May 1903, p. 8; Materialy, op. cit.,
p. 294.
usual contradiction in Russia: in Kishinev, criminals seem to be subjected to a
rigorous judicial repression, the American Jewish Yearbook stated,
astonished.1147
In the spring of 1904, the Cassation proceedings in Petersburg were made
public.1148 And in 1905 the Kishinev pogrom was once again examined in the
Senate; Winaver took the floor to prove nothing new.
In reality, the affair of the Kishinev pogrom had inflicted a hard lesson on
the tsarist government by revealing to it that a State that tolerates such infamy is
a scandalously impotent State. But the lesson would have been equally clear
without poisonous falsifications or false additions. Why did the simple truth
about Kichinevs pogrom seem insufficient? Presumably because this truth
would have reflected the true nature of the governmenta sclerotic
organisation, guilty of bullying the Jews, but which remained unsteady and
incoherent. However, with the aid of lies, it was represented as a wise
persecutor, infinitely sure of himself, and evil. Such an enemy could only
deserve annihilation.
The Russian government, which for a long time already had been largely
surpassed on the international stage, did not understand, either on the spot nor
afterwards, what a shocking defeat it had just wiped out there. This pogrom
soiled a stinking stain on all of Russian history, all the ideas that the world had
of Russia as a whole; the sinister gleam of fire projected by it announced and
precipitated the upheavals which were soon to shake the country.

1147The American Jewish Year Book, 5664 (19031904), Philadelphia, 1903, p. 22.
1148Froumkine, BJWR-1, pp. 6061.
 Chapter 9. During the Revolution of 1905

The Kishinev pogrom produced a devastating and indelible effect on the Jewish
community in Russia. Jabotinsky: Kishinev traces the boundary between two
epochs, two psychologies. The Jews of Russia have not only experienced deep
sorrow, but, more profoundly so, something which had almost made one forget
the painand that was shame.1149 If the carnage of Kishinev played a major
role in the realisation of our situation, it was because we then realised that the
Jews were cowards.1150
We have already mentioned the failure of the police and the awkwardness
of the authoritiesit was therefore natural that the Jews had asked themselves
the question: should we continue to rely on the protection of public authorities?
Why not create our own armed militias and defend ourselves weapons in hand?
They were incited by a group of prominent public men and writersDoubnov,
Ahad Haam, Rovnitsky, BenAmi, Bialik: Brothers cease weeping and
begging for mercy. Do not expect any help from your enemies. Only rely on
your own arms!1151
These calls produced on Jewish youth the effect of an electric shock.1152
And in the overheated atmosphere that began to reign after the Kishinev
pogrom, armed groups of selfdefence quickly saw the light at various
locations in the Pale of Settlement. They were generally financed by the Jewish
community1153, and the illegal introduction of weapons from abroad did not
pose a problem for the Jews. It was not unusual for these weapons to fall into
the hands of very young people.
Official reports do not indicate the existence of armed groups among the
Christian population. The government struggled as best it could against the
bombs of terrorists. When armed militias began to develop, it saw in themit is

1149V. Jabotinsky, Vvedenie (Preface to Kh. N. Bialik, Pesni i poemy (Songs and Poems), Saint
Petersburg, Zalzman ed., 1914, pp. 4243.
1150V. Jabotinsky, V traournye dni (Days of Mourning), Felietony, Saint Petersburg, Tipografia
Guerold, 1913, p. 25.
1151M. Krohl, Kishinovsky pogrom 1903 goda Kishinvskiy pogromnyi protsess (The Kishinev
pogrom of 1903), BJWR-2, New York, 1944, p. 377.
1152Ibidem.
1153S. Dimanstein, Revoloutsionnoe dvijenie sredi ievreyev (The revolution-Saint Petersburg,
1905: Istoria rcvoloutsionnovo dvijenia v otdelnykh otcherkakh (History of the
Revolutionary Movementabbreviated: 1905) / pod redaktskiei M. N. Pokrovskovo, vol.
3, vyp. 1, M. L., 1927, p. 150.
only naturaltotally illegal demonstrations, the premises of the civil war, and it
banned them by the means and information it had at its disposal. (Also today,
the whole world condemns and prohibits illegal paramilitary formations.)
A highly operational armed group was formed in Gomel under the direction
of the local committee of the Bund. On March 1st, 1903, the latter had
organised festivities for the anniversary of the execution of Alexander II.1154
In this city, where Christians and Jews were nearly equal in number 1155, and the
socialist Jews were more than determined, the establishment of armed groups of
selfdefence was particularly strong. This was to be noted during the events of
August 29th and September 1st 1903the Gomel pogrom.
According to the findings of the official investigation, the responsibility for
the Gomel pogrom is shared: Christians and Jews mutually attacked each other.
Let us take a closer look at the official documents of the time, in this case
the indictment of the Gomel affair, based on the police reports drawn up on the
spot. (Police reports, which date back to the early twentieth century in Russia,
have repeatedly proven their accuracy and their irreproachable precisionand
this up to the hustle and bustle of the days of February 1917, up to the moment
where the police stations of Petrograd were vested by the insurgents, burnt
downsince then, this stream of minutelyrecorded information was cut off,
and remained so for us.)
At the Gomel trial, the indictment states: The Jewish population began
to procure weapons and to organise selfdefence circles in the event of trouble
directed at the Jews Some residents of Gomel had the opportunity to attend
Jewish youth training sessions outside the city and which gathered up to a
hundred people practising shooting guns.1156
The generalisation of the possession of weapons, on the one hand, the
awareness of ones numerical superiority and cohesion, on the other hand, have
emboldened the Jewish population to the extent that, among its youth, they
spoke not only of selfdefence, but of indispensable revenge for the Kishinev
pogrom.
Thus hatred expressed in one place is reflected in another, distantand
against the innocent.
For some time past, the attitude of the Jews of Gomel has become not only
contemptuous, but frankly provocative; the attacksboth verbal and physical
on peasants and workers have become commonplace, and the Jews display their
contempt in all sorts of ways even against the Russians belonging to higher
social strata, for example, by forcing soldiers to change sidewalk. On August
29th, 1903, everything started with a banal incident in a market: an altercation
between the herring merchant Malitskaya and her client Chalykov; she spat in
1154N. A. Buchbinder, Ivrevskoye rabotchee dvijenie v Gomele (18901905) (The Jewish
Workers Movement in Gomel [18901905]), Krasnaya lelopis: Istoritcheskii journal, Pg.,
1922, nos. 23, pp. 6569.
1155Ibidem, p. 38.
1156Kievskaya soudebnaya palata: Delo o gomelskom pogrom (Kiev courthouse: the Gomel
pogrom case), Pravo, Saint Petersburg, 1904, no. 44, pp. 30413042.
his face, the dispute turned into a brawl, immediately several Jews rushed upon
Chalykov, threw him to the ground, and began to strike him with everything
they could put their hands on. A dozen peasants wanted to defend Chalykov, but
the Jews immediately emitted whistles previously agreed upon, causing a
considerable influx of other Jews No doubt these whistles were a call for
help thus they immediately mobilised the entire Jewish population of the
city; on foot, by car, armed as they could, the Jews flocked to the market
everywhere. Very soon, the Street of the Market, the market itself and all the
adjacent streets were swarming with people; The Jews were armed with stones,
sticks, hammers, speciallymade clubs or even simply iron bars. Everywhere
shouts were heard: Lets go, Jews! To the market! It is the pogrom of the
Russians! And all this mass went into small groups to pursue the peasants to
strike themand the latter were numerous, on a market day. Leaving there
their purchases, the peasantswhen they had timejumped on their chariots
and hastened to leave the city Witnesses say that when they caught Russians,
the Jews beat them without mercy, they beat old people, women and even
children. For example, a little girl was pulled out of a chariot and dragged by
her hair on the roadway. A peasant by the name of Silkov had placed himself
at some distance to enjoy the spectacle while nibbling a piece of bread. At that
moment, a Jew who ran behind him struck his throat with a mortal knife wound,
then disappeared among the crowd. Other episodes are listed. An officer was
only saved thanks to the intervention of Rabbi Maiants and the owner of the
neighbouring house, Rudzievsky. Upon arriving at the scene, the police were
welcomed on the Jews side, by a hail of stones and by revolver shots which
started not only from the crowd but also from the balconies of neighbouring
buildings; the violence against the Christian population continued almost
until the evening, and it was only with the arrival of a detachment from the
army that the mobs of Jews were dispersed; the Jews struck the Russians, and
especially the peasants, who were incapable of any resistance, either because
of their small number compared to that of the Jews or because of their lack of
defences That day, all the victims were Russians many wounded, people
beaten to a pulp.1157 The indictment concludes with regard to the events of
August 29th that they undeniably had the character of an antiRussian
pogrom.1158
These facts caused deep indignation among the Christian population,
which reinforced the euphoric mood of the Jews, their enthusiasm: We
are no longer in Kishinev! On September 1st, after the midday siren, the
railway workers were abnormally noisy as they left the workshops, shouts and
exclamations were heard, and the chief of police ordered to block the bridge
leading to the city. Then the workers spread to the neighbouring streets and
stones flew to the windows of houses inhabited by Jews, while in the city
were beginning to form large gatherings of Jews who threw from a distance

1157Ibidem, pp. 30413043.

1158Ibidem, p. 3041.
pieces of wood and stones onto the crowd of workers; two paving stones
thrown by the Jewish crowd struck a police commissioner in the back who fell
unconscious. The Russian crowd began to yell: the kikes have killed the
commissary! and undertook to sack Jewish houses and shops. The intervention
of the troop, which separated the adversaries and deployed itself in the face of
both, prevented the shedding of blood. On the Jews side, stones were thrown,
and revolver shots were fired at the soldiers with a shower of insults. The
commander asked Rabbi Maiants and Doctor Zalkind to intervene with the
Jews, but their appeals for calm were of no effect and the crowd continued its
agitation; it was only possible to draw it back by pointing the bayonets. The
main success of the army was to prevent the breakers from reaching the city
centre, where were found the shops and houses of the wealthy Jews. Then the
pogrom moved to the outskirts of the city. The chief of the police still tried to
exhort the crowd, but they cried out: You are with the Jews, you have betrayed
us! The salvos drawn by the troops upon the Russians as well as on the Jews
curbed the pogrom, but two hours later it resumed in the suburbsagain
shootings on the crowd, several dead and wounded, and then the pogrom
ceased. However, the indictment refers to the presence in the city centre of
groups of Jews who conducted themselves in a very provocative manner and
opposed the army and the police As on 29 August, all were armed many
brandished revolvers and daggers, going as far as firing shots or throwing
stones on the troops charged to protect their property; they attacked the
Russians who ventured alone in the streets, including the soldiers: a peasant
and a beggar were killed. During that day, three middleclass Jews succumbed
to deadly wounds. Towards the evening the disorders ceased. Five Jews and
four Christians had been killed. Nearly 250 commercial or residential premises
belonging to Jews had been affected by the pogrom. On the Jewish side, the
overwhelming majority of active participants in the events consisted exclusively
of young people, but many more mature people, as well as children, had
handed them stones, boards, and logs.1159
No description of these events can be found by any Jewish writer.
The Gomel pogrom had not taken its organisers off guard. It had been
prepared for a long time, the formation of selfdefence had been put in place
soon after the events of Kishinev.1160 Only a few months after Kishinev, the
Jews could no longer despise themselves for the resigned attitude with which
they were accused of, among others, by the poet Bialik. And, as always happens
with armed groups of this type, the boundary between defence and attack
became blurred. The first was fed by the Kishinev pogrom, the second of the
revolutionary spirit of the organisers.
(Activism of Jewish youth had already manifested itself before. Thus, in
1899, the Chklov affair was revealed: in this city where there were nine Jews
for a Russian, disarmed Russian soldiersthey were demobilisedwere

1159Ibidem, pp. 30433046.

1160Buchbinder, op. cit., p. 69.
severely beaten by Jews. After examining this episode, the Senate considered it
to be a manifestation of ethnic and religious hatred of Jews towards Russians
under the same article of the Penal Code as that had been applied to the trial of
those responsible for the Kishinev pogrom.)
This activism must not be accounted for solely by the Bund. At the head
of this process [of creating, at a steady pace, organisations of selfdefence] are
found the Zionists and the parties close to Zionismthe ZionistSocialists and
the Poalei Zion. Thus, it is how in Gomel, in 1903, the majority of the
detachments were organised by the Poalei Zion party. 1161 (Which contradicts
Buchbinder, fervent admirer of the BundI do not really know whom to
believe.)
When the news of Gomels pogrom reached Saint Petersburg, the Jewish
Defence Office dispatched two lawyersstill Zaroudny and N. D. Sokolovto
proceed to a private investigation as soon as possible. Zaroudny once again
gathered irrefutable proofs that the pogrom had been organised by the
Department of Security,1162 but here also, they were not made public. (Thirty
years later, even Sliosberg, who participated in the trials of Gomel, followed
suit in his Memoirs in three volumes, asserting, without any shred of evidence
which seems incomprehensible on the part of a lawyer, mistaking the dates
and those errors that can be attributed to age, he found no one to correct them
, that the Gomel pogrom had been deliberately organised by the police. He
excludes also all offensive action on the part of the selfdefence detachments of
the Bund and of the Poalei Zion. (He speaks of it incoherently and confusedly,
for example: The young people of the selfdefence groups quickly put an end
to the misbehaviour and drove out the peasants, the young Jews gathered
promptly and, on more than one occasion, they were able to repel the
rioters,1163 just like that, without using any weapons? )
The official investigation was proceeding seriously, step by stepand
during that time Russia was plunging into the Japanese war. And it was not until
October 1904 that Gomels trial took placein a whitehot political
atmosphere.
Fortyfour Christians and 36 Jews appeared before the court; Nearly a
thousand people were called to the witness stand. 1164 The Defence Office was
represented by several lawyers: Sliosberg, Kupernik, Mandelstam,
Kalmanovich, Ratner, Krohl. From their point of view, it was unjust that even a
single Jew should be included in the bench of the accused: for the entire Jewish
community in Russia it was like a warning against recourse to self

1161L. Praisman, Pogromy i samooborona (The pogroms and selfdefence), 22:

Obchtchestvennopolititcheskii literatoumyi newspaper Ivreiskoi intelligentsii iz SSSR v
Izraele, Tel Aviv, 19861987, no. 51, p. 178.
1162From the minouvehikh dnei: Zapiski ruskovo ievreia (Things of the past: memories of a
Russian Jew), V 3-kh t. Paris, 19331934. t. 3, pp. 7879.
1163Ibidem, p. 77.
1164Delo o gomelskom pogrom (Kiev courthouse: the Gomel pogrom case), op. cit., p. 3040.
defence.1165 From the governments point of view, this was not selfdefence.
But the lawyers of the Jewish defendants did not deal with the details, nor the
Jewish property that had really been sackedthey focused only on one thing: to
uncover the political motives of the pogrom, for example, to point out that
Jewish youth, in the midst of the fray, was shouting: Down with the
autocracy! In fact, shortly afterwards, they decided to abandon their clients and
leave the courtroom collectively in order to send an even stronger message: to
repeat the precedent of the Kishinev trial.1166
This method, as skilful as it was revolutionary, was entirely in the air of the
time in December 1904: these liberal advocates wanted to explode the judicial
system itself!
After their departure, the trial quickly came to an end insofar as it was
now possible to examine the facts. Some of the Jews were acquitted, the others
were sentenced to penalties not exceeding five months; The condemnations
which befell the Christians were equal to those of the Jews. 1167 In the end, there
were about as many convictions on one side as on the other.1168

By plunging into the Japanese war, by adopting a rigid and insightful stance in
the conflict over Korea, neither the Emperor Nicholas II nor the high dignitaries
around him realised how much, on the international plane, Russia was
vulnerable to the west and especially to the traditionally friendly America.
Nor did they take into account the rise of Western financiers, who were already
influencing the policy of the great powers, increasingly dependent on credit. In
the nineteenth century things did not happen this way yet, and the Russian
government, always slow to react, did not know how to perceive these changes.
However, after the Kishinev pogrom, Western opinion had become firmly
established in an attitude of repulsion towards Russia, considered as an old
scarecrow, an Asiatic and despotic country where obscurantism reigns, where
the people are exploited, where the revolutionaries are treated without pity,
subjected to inhuman sufferings and deprivations, and now they are massacring
the Jews by the thousands, and behind all this there is the hand of the
government! (As we have seen, the government was unable to rectify this
distorted version of the facts in time, with energy and efficiency.) So, in the
West, people began to consider it appropriate, even worthy of consideration, to
hope that the revolution would break out in Russia as soon as possible: it would
be a good thing for the whole worldand for the Jews of Russia in particular.
And, above all, the incompetence, the incapacity, the unpreparedness to
conduct faroff military operations against a country that at that time seemed
1165JE, t. 6, p. 666.
1166Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 7887.
1167JE, t. 6, p. 667.
1168I. G. Froumkine, Iz istorii ruskovo ievrestva(Sb.) Kniga o rousskom cvrcve: Ot 1860
godov do Revolutsii 1917 g. (Aspects of the History of Russian Jews), in BJWR-1, p. 61.
small and weak, in the context of an agitated, openly hostile public opinion, that
longed for the defeat of its own country.
The sympathy of the United States for Japan expressed itself abundantly in
the American press. It hailed every Japanese victory and did not hide its desire
to see Russia undergo a rapid and decisive setback.1169 Witte mentions twice in
his Memoirs that President Theodore Roosevelt was on the side of Japan and
supported it.1170 And Roosevelt himself: As soon as this war broke out I
brought to Germanys and Frances attention, with the utmost courtesy and
discretion, that in case of an antiJapanese agreement with Russia I would
immediately take the side of Japan and would do everything in the future to
serve its interests.1171 It may be supposed that Roosevelts intentions were not
unknown to Japan.
And it was there that the very powerful banker Jakob Schiff appearedone
of the greatest of the Jews, he who could realise his ideals thanks to his
exceptional position in the economic sphere.1172 From his earliest years Schiff
took care of business affairs; he emigrated from Germany to New York and
soon became head of the Bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In 1912, he is in America
the king of rail, owner of twentytwo thousand miles of railroads; he also has
a reputation as an energetic and generous philanthropist; he is particularly
sensitive to the needs of the Jewish community. 1173 Schiff was particularly keen
on the fate of the Russian Jewshence his hostility towards Russia until 1917.
According to the Encyclopdia Judaica (in English), Schiff made a
remarkable contribution to the allocation of credits to his own government and
to that of other countries, particularly pointing out a loan of 200 million dollars
to Japan during the conflict opposing it to Russia in 19041905. Outraged by
the antiSemitic policy of the tsarist regime in Russia, he eagerly supported the
Japanese war effort. He constantly refused to participate in lending to Russia
and used his influence to deter other institutions from doing so, while granting
financial aid to the selfdefence groups of Russian Jews.1174 But while it is true
that this money allowed the Bund and the Poalei Zion to supply themselves with
weapons, it is no less likely that they also benefited from other revolutionary
organisations in Russia (including the S.R. who, at the time, practised
terrorism). There is evidence that Schiff, in an interview with an official of the
Ministry of Finance of Russia, G. A. Vilenkine, who was also one of his distant
relatives, acknowledged that he contributed to the financing of the

1169F. R. Dulles, The Road to Tehran: The Story of Russia and America, 17811943,
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1944, pp. 8889.
1170S. I. Witte, Vospominania. Tsarstvovanie Nikolaa (Memoirs, The Reign of Nicholas II). In
2 vols., Berlin, Slovo, 1922, t. 1, pp. 376, 393.
1171T. Dennett, Roosevelt and the RussoJapanese War, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1925
(reprinted: Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith, 1959), p. 2.
1172Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 155.
1173JE, t. 16, p. 41.
1174Encyclopdia Judaica, vol. 14, Jerusalem, Keter Publishing House, Ltd., 1971, p. 961.
revolutionary movement in Russia and that things had gone too far 1175 to put
an end to it.
However, in Russia, Baron G. O. Ginzburg continued to intervene in favour
of equal rights for the Jews. To this end, in 1903 he visited Witte at the head of
a Jewish delegation. The latter (who had already dealt with the Jewish question
when he was secretarygeneral of the government) replied to them then: that the
Jews should be granted equal rights only gradually, but in order for the
question to be raised, the Jews must adopt a completely different behaviour,
that is to say, to refrain from interfering in the political life of the country. It is
not your business, leave it to those who are Russian by blood and civil status, it
is not for you to give us lessons, you should rather take care of yourself.
Ginzburg, Sliosberg, and Koulicher agreed with this opinion, other participants
did not, particularly Winaver, who objected: The time has come to grant equal
rights to all the subjects [of the empire] The Jews must support with all their
strength those of the Russians who fight for it, and thus against the power in
place.1176
From the Japanese war, from the beginning of 1904, the Russian
government sought financial support from the West, and in order to obtain it,
was willing to promise an extension of the rights of the Jews. At Plehves
request, high personalities came into contact with Baron Ginzburg on this
subject, and Sliosberg was sent abroad to survey the opinion of the greatest
Jewish financiers. As a matter of principle, Schiff declined all bargaining over
the number and nature of the rights granted to the Jews. He could enter into
financial relations only with a government that recognises to all its citizens the
equality of civic and political rights One can only maintain financial
relations with civilized countries. In Paris, Baron de Rothschild also refused:
I am not prepared to mount any financial operation whatsoever, even if the
Russian government brings improvements to the fate of the Jews.1177
Witte succeeded in obtaining a large loan without the help of Jewish
financial circles. Meanwhile, in 19031904, the Russian government had
undertaken to lift certain provisions limiting the rights of the Jews (we have
already mentioned them in part). The first step in this direction, and the most
important, had been, during Plehves lifetime, and by way of derogation of the
1882 Regulations, the lifting of the prohibition on Jews settling in 101 densely
populated localities which were not considered cities despite significant
industrial and commercial activity, particularly in the grain trade. 1178 Secondly,
the decision to promote a group of Jews to the rank of avowed attorneys, which
had not been done since 1889.1179 After the assassination of Plehve and the era
of confidence inaugurated by the shortlived minister of the Interior
SviatopolkMirsky, this process continued. Thus, for Jews with higher
1175A. Davydov, Vospominania, 18811955 (Memoirs, 18811955), Paris, 1982.
1176Witte, Memoirs, op. cit., t. 2, pp. 286287.
1177Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 97, 100101.
1178JE, t. 5, p. 863.
1179Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 190.
education, the lifting of restrictive measures taken in 1882 took place, including
the right to settle in areas previously prohibited to them, such as those of the
Army of the Don, of Kuban, of Terek. The ban on residence in the border strip
of 50 versts was also lifted; they reestablished the right (abolished under
Alexander II after 1874) to reside throughout the whole territory of the empire
for the brass of the army of Jewish origin with exemplary service
records.1180 On the occasion of the birth of the heir to the throne, in 1904,
amnesty was decreed on the fines, which had befallen the Jews who had evaded
their military obligations.
But all these concessions came too late. In the node of the Japanese war
that surrounded Russia, they were henceforth not accepted, as we have seen,
neither by Western Jewish financiers, nor by the majority of Jewish politicians
in Russia, nor, with strong reason, by Jewish youth. And in response to
statements made by SviatopolkMirsky when he took officepromising relief
in both the Pale of Settlement and the choice of an activitya declaration of
more than six thousand people (The signatures had been collected by the
Jewish Democratic Group): We consider all efforts to satisfy and appease the
Jewish population by partial improvements in their condition as futile. We
consider as null and void any policy of gradually lifting the prohibitions
weighing on us We are waiting for equal rights we make of it a matter of
honour and justice.1181
It had become easier to weigh on a government entangled in war.
It goes without saying that, in a context in which cultivated Russian society
had only contempt for power, it was difficult to expect Jewish youth to manifest
massively its patriotic enthusiasm. According to the data provided by General
Kushropkin, then Minister of War, then commanderinchief of the eastern
front, in 1904 the number of insubordinates among the Jewish conscripts
doubled compared with the year 1903; more than 20,000 of them have evaded
their military obligations without good cause. Out of 1,000 conscripts, more
than 300 were missing, while among the Russian conscripts this number fell to
only 2 per 1,000. As for the Jewish reservists, they deserted en masse on the
way to the area of military operations.1182
An American statistic suggests indirectly that from the beginning of the
Japanese war there was a wave of mass emigration of Jews of military service
age. During the two years of war, the figures for Jewish immigration to the
United States increased very sharply for people of working age (1444 years)
and men: the former were 29,000 more than what they were expected,
(compared to other immigrant categories); the second, 28,000 more (compared
to women). After the war, the usual proportions were found.1183 (The Kievian
newspaper reported at the time that from 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish soldiers and
1180JE, t. 5, pp. 671, 864.
1181Frumkin, op. cit., BJWR-1, pp. 64, 109110.
1182A. N. Kouropatkine, Zadatchi ruskko armii (The Problems of the Russian Army), Saint
Petersburg, 1910, t. 3, pp. 344345.
1183JE, t. 2, pp. 239240.
reservists have gone into hiding or fled abroad.1184 In the article Military
service in Russia of the Jewish Encyclopdia, we can see a comparative
picture of insubordination among Jews and Christians, according to official
figures, the proportion of the former compared with the latter is 30 to one in
1902 and 34 to one in 1903. The Jewish Encyclopdia indicates that these
figures can also be explained by emigration, deaths not taken into account, or
miscalculations, but the inexplicable absence in this table of statistical data for
1904 and 1905, leaves no possibility of obtaining a precise idea of the extent of
the insubordination during the war.1185
As for the Jewish fighters, the Jewish Encyclopdia says that there were
between 20,000 and 30,000 during the war, not to mention the 3,000 Jews
serving as doctors; and it points out that even the newspaper Novoe Vremia,
although hostile to the Jews, recognised their courageous behaviour in
combat.1186 These statements are corroborated by the testimony of General
Denikin In the Russian army, the Jewish soldiers, resourceful and
conscientious, adapted well, even in times of peace. But in times of war all
differences were selfeffacing, and individual courage and intelligence were also
recognised.1187 A historical fact: the heroism of Iossif Troumpeldor who, having
lost a hand, asked to remain in the ranks. In fact, he was not the only one to
distinguish himself.1188
At the end of this war lost by Russia, President Theodore Roosevelt agreed
to mediate the talks with Japan (Portsmouth, USA). Witte, who led the Russian
delegation, evokes this delegation of Jewish big shots who came to see me
twice in America to talk to me about the Jewish question. These were Jakob
Schiff, the eminent lawyer Louis Marshall and Oscar Strauss, among others.
The position of Russia had become rather uncomfortable, which imposed a
more conciliatory tone on the Russian minister than in 1903. Wittes arguments
raised violent objections on the part of Schiff.1189 Fifteen years later, Kraus,
one of the members of this delegation, who in 1920 became president of the
Bnai Brith Lodge, said: If the tsar does not give his people the freedoms to
which it is entitled, the revolution will be able to establish a republic that will
allow access to these freedoms.1190
During the same weeks, a new danger began to undermine Russian
American relations. On his way back to Witte, T. Roosevelt asked him to inform
the Emperor that the trade agreement which had long bound (1832) his country

1184Kievlianine, 16 Dec. 1905V. V. Choulguine, Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa Ob

Antisemilizm v Rossii (What we do not like about them On AntiSemitism in Russia),
Paris, 1929, annexes, p. 308.
1185JE, t. 5, pp. 705707.
1186Ibidem, t. 3, pp. 168169.
1187A. I. Denikine, Pout rousskovo ofitsera (The Routine of a Russian Officer), New York, ed.
Imeni Chekhov, 1953, p. 285.
1188JE, t. 3, p. 169.
1189Witte, op. cit., t. 1, pp. 394395.
1190Bnai Brith News, May 1920, vol. XII, no. 9.
to Russia would suffer if it applied confessional restrictions to American
businessmen going to its territory.1191 This protest, which, of course, was a
matter of principle, concerned, in practice, a significant number of Russian Jews
who had immigrated to the United States and had become American citizens.
They returned to Russiaoften to engage in revolutionary activities
henceforth as merchants who were not subject to any professional or
geographical limitation. This landmine could only explode a few years later.
For several years Stuttgart had published the Osvobojdenie1192 magazine,
and the great mass of cultivated Russians scarcely concealed its sympathies for
the illegal organisation Union for Liberation. In the autumn of 1904, a
banqueting campaign was held in all the major cities of Russia, where
impassioned and premonitory toasts were called for the overthrow of the
regime. Participants from abroad also spoke in public (such as Tan Bogoraz).
Political unrest had penetrated all layers of the Jewish community. The
latter was engulfed in this bubbling, without distinction of classes or parties.
Thus many Jewish public men, even of patriotic sensibility, were part of the
Union for Liberation.1193 Like all Russian liberals, they proved to be
defeatists during the Japanese war. Like them, they applauded the
executions of the ministers Bogolepov, Sipiagin, Plehve. And this entire
progressive Russia pushed even the Jews in this direction, unable to admit
that a Jew could be more on the right than a leftwing democrat, but feeling that
he should, more naturally yet, be a socialist. A Conservative Jew? Ugh! Even in
an academic institution such as the Jewish HistoricalEthnographic
Commission, in these tumultuous years there was no time to serenely engage
in scientific research it was necessary to make History. 1194 The radical
and revolutionary movements within the Russian Jewish community have
always been based on the idea that the problem of equal rights the
fundamental historical question of the Jews of Russia, would be solved only
when one would cut once for all the head of the Medusa and all the serpents that
spring from it.1195
During these years in Saint Petersburg, the Jewish Defence Office
developed its activities with the aim of fighting antiSemitic literature and
disseminating appropriate information on the legal situation of Jews in order to
influence mainly the opinion of liberal Russian circles. (Sliosberg points out

1191Witte, op. cit., p. 401.

1192Organ of the Union for Liberation, organisation of the liberal opposition, which became the
ConstitutionalDemocratic Party (or KD, or Cadet) in 1905.
1193G. I. Aronson, V borbe za grajdanskie i natsionalnye prava: Obchtchestvennye tetchenia v
rousskom evrestve (The struggle for civil and national rights: The movements of opinion
within the Jewish community of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 221222.
1194M. L. Vichnitser, Iz peterbourgskikh vospominanii (Memories of Petersburg), BJWR-1, p.
41.
1195S. Ivanovich, Ievrei i sovetskaya diktatoura (The Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship), pp.
4142.
that these activities were largely subsidised by the international EK01196.1197) But
it was not so much Russian society that it was a question of influencing. The
Bureau did not open branches in Russia, not even in Moscow, Kiev, or Odessa:
on the one hand, Zionist propaganda absorbed all the energy of the most
cultivated Jews; on the other, Bund propaganda mobilised the greater part of
the educated Jewish youth. (Sliosberg insisting that the Bund be condemned,
Winaver objected that he should not quarrel with the Bund: it disposes of
energy and propaganda power.1198 However, the Bureau soon maintained a
strong relationship, built on reciprocal information and mutual aid, with the
American Jewish Committee (chaired by J. Schiff, then Louis Marshall), the
English Jewish Committee (Claude Montefiore, Lucine Woolf), the Alliance in
Paris and the Support Committee of the German Jews (Hilfsverein der
deutschen Juden: James Simon, Paul Nathan1199).
Here is the testimony of M. Krohl: The heart of our group was the Press
Office[whose mission was to disseminate] through the Russian and foreign
press serious information about the situation of the Jews in Russia. It was A. I.
Braudo who undertook this task. He accomplished it perfectly. Under the
conditions of the Russia of that time, this kind of work required a great deal of
prudence, was to be carried out in the greatest secrecy. Even the members of
the Defence Office did not know by what means or by what channels he had
succeeded in organising such and such a press campaign A large number of
articles published in the Russian or foreign press of the time, often with great
repercussions, had been communicated to the newspapers or magazines either
personally by Braudo, or through his intermediary.1200
Providing serious information to launch this or that press campaignit
is a bit chilling, especially in light of what happened in the 20th century. In
todays language, it is called skilful manipulation of the media.
In March 1905 the Defence Bureau convened in Vilnius the Constituent
Congress of the Union for the Equal Rights for the Jewish People in
Russia,1201 but it quickly proceeded to its selfdissolution and joined the
direction of the Union for the integrality of rights (the expression integrality,
because it was stronger than that of equal rights, had been proposed by
Winaver. Today, we evoke it under a hybrid form such as the Union for
Achieving Integral Equality of Rights1202).
It was wanted that this new Union bring together all Jewish parties and
groups.1203 But the Bund denounced this congress as a bourgeois. However,
many Zionists could not remain in their splendid isolation. The prodromes of

1196Jewish mutual aid committee

1197Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 132, 248249.
1198Ibidem, pp. 138, 168.
1199Ibidem, pp. 142147, 152157.
1200M. Krohl, Stranitsy moiei jisni (Pages of my life), t. 1, New York, 1944, pp. 299300.
1201JE, t. 14, p. 515.
1202RJE, t. 3, M., 1997, p. 65.
1203JE, t. 14, p. 515.
the Russian revolution led to a split in their ranks. And some of these fractions
did not resist the temptation to participate in the great things that unfolded
before their eyes! But in so doing, they exerted an influence on the strictly civic
orientation of the congress agenda. The idea was making its way not only to
fight for civic rights but also, with the same energy, for national rights.1204
Sliosberg fought against the influence of the Zionists who wanted to
withdraw the Jews from the number of citizens of Russia and whose demands
were often formulated only for demagogic reasons. For the Jewish community
in Russia has in no way been limited in the expression of its national life
Was it appropriate to raise the question of national autonomy of the Jews when
none of the nationalities living in Russia possessed it, whereas the Russian
people themselves, in their orthodox part, were far from being free in the
expression of their religious and national life? But, at that time, demagogy
assumed a very special significance in the Jewish backstreet.1205
Thus, in place of the notion, clear in the eyes of everyone, of equality of
rights, which certainly had not yet happened, but seemed no longer to lag
behind political developments, the slogan was issued for the integrality of
rights of the Jews. What was meant by this was that, in addition to equal rights,
national autonomy was also recognised. It must be said that those who
formulated these requirements did not have a very clear idea of their content.
The creation of Jewish schools was not limited by any law. The study of the
Russian language was required insofar as it was not a question of Heders.1206
But other more civilised countries also imposed the use of the State language in
relations with the administration as well as in school. 1207 Thus, there was no
national autonomy for the Jews in the United States. But the obtentionists
(Union for the obtention) demanded national and cultural self
determination on the territory of Russia, as well as a substantial autonomy for
the Jewish communities (and, in the same breath: the secularisation of these, to
tear them away from the religious influence of Judaismwhich suited both the
Zionists and the Socialists). Later, this was called nationalpersonal
autonomy. (Accompanied by the requirement that the Jewish cultural and
social institutions be financed by the State but without it interfering in their
functioning.) And how can we imagine the selfmanagement of a nation
scattered territorially? The Second Congress of the Union, in November 1905,
took the decision to convene a Jewish National Assembly of Russia.1208
All these ideas, including the nationalpersonal autonomy of the Jews of
Russia, were expressed and continued in various forms until 1917. However,
the Union for the Integrality of Rights proved ephemeral. At the end of 1906,
the Jewish Peoples AntiZionist Group seceded (Winaver, Sliosberg, Koulicher,
Sternberg) on the grounds that it refused the idea of a Jewish National
1204Aronson, The Struggle, op. cit., p. 222.
1205Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 170171.
1206Jewish elementary schools
1207Ibidem, p. 170.
1208JE, t. 14, p. 516.
Assembly; shortly afterwards it was the turn of the Jewish Peoples Party (S.
Doubnovreligious and cultural nationalism, notably the right to use the
Jewish language in public life throughout the country, but with what means,
how?); then the Jewish Democratic Group (Bramson, Landau), close to the
Labour Party.1209 The Union for the integrality of rights was also accused of
having rallied to the KD and, consequently, was no longer being able to
represent the Jewish population of Russia; the Zionists regarded the
secularists as partisans of assimilation, and the socialists as bourgeois.1210 In
short, at the beginning of 1907, the Union ceased to exist.1211
The Zionists were increasingly drawn into the revolutionary whirlpool, and
in November 1906, at their AllRussian Congress in Helsinfors, it was declared
indispensable not only to turn to the daily needs and demands of the Jews of
Russia, but also to engage fully in their political and social struggle1212;
Jabotinsky insisted that the Zionist program should include the requirement of
the establishment in Russia of the sovereignty of the people; D. Pasmanik
objected that such a demand can only be made by those who are ready to stand
on the barricades.1213 At the end of its work, the Congress brought its sanction
to the rallying of the Zionists to the Liberation Movement. 1214 But the latter
was just about to lose momentum after the failure of Vyborgs manifesto.1215
The author of this program, Jabotinsky, put forward the following
arguments: the goal set by Zionism can only be reached in several decades, but
by fighting for their full rights, Jews will understand better what Zionism is. 1216
However, he said: We leave the first ranks to the representatives of the
majority nation. We cannot pretend to play a leading role: we are aligning
ourselves.1217 In other words: Palestine is one thing; in the meantime, let us fight
in Russia. Three years earlier, Plehve had told Herzl that he feared precisely this
kind of drift of Zionism.
Sliosberg is far from minimising the role of the Zionists: After the
Congress of Helsinfors, they decided to take control of all public activities of
the Jews by trying to impose their influence at the local level. (In the first
Duma, of the 12 Jewish deputies, five were Zionists.) But he also notes that this

1209Ibidem, t. 7, pp. 437440.

1210Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 257258.
1211JE, t. 14. p. 517.
1212Aronson, The Struggle, op. cit., p. 224.
1213D. S. Pasmanik, Chevo je my dobivaemsia? (What do we really want?), Rossia i Ievrei, Sb
1 (Russia and the Jews, book 1later: RJ) / Otetchestvennoe obedinenie rousskikh
ievreyev za granitsei, Paris, YMCA Press, 1978, p. 211.
1214Aronson, The Struggle, op. cit., p. 224.
1215After the dissolution of the first Duma, about two hundred deputies met at Vyborg, and
expressed their opposition to the government in the form of a manifesto, which did not meet
with any public echo.
1216G. Svet, Rousskie evrei v sionizme i v stroitelstve Palestiny i Izrailia (Russian Jews in
Zionism and the Construction of Palestine and Israel), BJWR-1, pp. 263264.
1217V. Jabotinsky, levreiskaya kramola (The Jewish Conspiracy), Felietony, p. 43.
profusion of parties was the business of small circles of intellectuals, not of
the Jewish masses, and their propaganda only caused to confuse the issues.1218
True, all this scattering did not contribute to the clarification of the debate:
it was no longer very clear what the Russian Jews were fighting, for what rights
equal or integral?or on which plancivic or national?
And, let us not forget: All these groups composed only of intellectuals
did not understand Orthodox Jews, who eventually understood the need to
organise to combat the growing antireligious influence exerting itself on
Jewish youth. And it was thus that was born what was later to develop in
TAgoudat Israel. This movement was concerned that Jewish revolutionary
elements are recruited among the Jewish youth who have moved away from
religion, whereas the majority of the Jews are religious and, while demanding
recognition of their rights and the lifting of the prohibitions against them,
remain loyal subjects of the Emperor and are far from any idea of overthrowing
the existing regime.1219
When one studies the history of Russian Jews at the beginning of the
twentieth century, there are few references to Orthodox Jews. Sliosberg once
said, raising the ire of the Bund: With the melameds1220 behind me, I rely on a
greater number of Jews than the Bund leaders, for there are more melameds
among the Jews than the workers.1221 In fact, the secularisation of Jewish
society in no way affected the existence of traditional communities in the Pale
of Settlement. For them, all the ancestral questions concerning the organisation
of their lives, the religious instruction, the rabbinate, remained topical. During
the temporary lull of 1909, the reform of the traditional Jewish community was
discussed with great seriousness at the Kovno Congress. The work of the
Congress proved to be very fruitful, and few Jewish assemblies could have
equalled it by the seriousness and wisdom of the resolutions adopted there.1222
Orthodox Judaism has always been in conflictnot always open, but
rather latentwith the Jewish intelligentsia. It was clear that in condemning the
movement for the liberation of the Jews it hoped to win the governments
favour.1223 But it was too late: on the eve of the 1905 revolution, we have seen
that the autocratic regime had lost control of the country. As for traditional
Judaism, it had already lost a whole generationmoreover it was not the first
who had gone towards Zionism, secular liberalism, rarely enlightened
conservatism, but also, and with the heaviest consequences, towards the
revolutionary movement.

1218Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 253, 255, 262.

1219Ibidem, pp. 225256.
1220Teachers teaching in heders.
1221Ibidem, p. 258.
1222Ibidem, p. 263.
1223Ibidem, p. 265.
The new generation of revolutionaries had emerged at the turn of the century. Its
leaders, Grigory Gershuni and Mikhail Gotz, had decided to revive the terrorist
methods of The Will of the People. Gershuni took upon himself the heavy
responsibility of creating in Russia a new revolutionary party called to succeed
with dignity to the Will of the People, and thanks to his talents as organiser as
well as to those of other revolutionaries entirely devoted to the cause, this party
was born at the end of the year 1901. At the same time was also constituted
its armed faction. Its creator and its inspirer was none other than the very same
Gershuni.1224 Among the S.R.1225, the Jews immediately played a leading
role. Amongst them were Anski Rappoport, K. Jitlovsky, Ossip Minor, I.
Roubanovitch andstill him!Mark Natanson. The armed faction included
among its members Abraham Gotz, Dora Brilliant, L. Zilberberg, not to
mention the famous Azef. It is among the S.R. That M. Trilisser was also
formedhe who later would become famous in the Cheka. Among the
grassroots activists of the S.R. party, there were also quite a few Jews, even
though, adds Schub, they never represented a tiny minority. According to him,
it is even the most Russian of the revolutionary parties.1226 For security
reasons, the seat of the party was transferred abroad (for example, the Bund was
absent), in Geneva, at M. Gotz and O. Minors place.
As for Gershuni, this indomitable tiger, after succeeding in deceiving
Zubatovs1227 vigilance, he began to criss-cross Russia, like B. Savinkov,
fomenting terrorist actions and checking their proper execution. It was thus that
he was present at the Place SaintIsaac during the assassination of Sipiagin 1228;
he was at Ufa when Governor Bogdanovitch was killed 1229; and at Kharkov
when it was Governor Obolenskys turn; on the Nevsky prospect during the
failed attack on Pobedonostsev1230. The execution was always entrusted to
Christians such as P. Karpovitch, S. Balmachov, E. Sozonov, etc. (The bombs
used for the assassination of Plehve, Grand Duke Sergey Aleksandrovich, and
planned attacks on Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and Interior Ministers
Boulygin and Durnovo were made by Maximilian Schweitzer, who in 1905 was
himself victim of the machine he was making. 1231) Arrested by chance, Gershuni
was condemned to death, reprieved by the Emperor without having asked for it;
in 1907 he found an ingenious means of escaping from the prison of Akatuysk,
hiding in a cabbagebarrel, and then gained by way of Vladivostok, America and
Europe; the Russian government demanded his extradition from Italy, but the
European liberal opinion was unanimous in refusing it and Clemenceau also

1224Krohl, Stanitsy (Pages), op. cit., pp. 283284.

1225Social Revolutionaries.
1226D. Schub, Evrei roussko revolutsii (The Jews in the Russian Revolution), JW-2, p. 138.
1227Chief of the Russian secret police at the beginning of the twentieth century.
1228Minister of the Interior assassinated in 1902.
1229SJE, t. 2, p. 111.
1230Politician with revolutionary ideas, very influential with the emperors Alexander and
Nicolas II (18271907).
1231RJE, t. 3, pp. 378379.
used his influence: he was also, as we know, a tiger. Soon after, Gershuni died
of a sarcoma in the lung. Among other leading S.R. terrorists, we must also
mention Abraham Gotz, who played an active part in the attacks on Dournovo,
Akimov, Shuvalov, Trepov1232, and played a role in the assassination of Mine
and Rieman. (But, he had the misfortune of living much longer than his elder
brother, who died prematurelyand the Bolsheviks later gave him a hard time.)
To play with History, precautions were less taken than the previous
revolutionary generation. Less well known than others, Pinhas (Pyotr)
Rutenberg is not less worthy of interest. In 1905 he trained groups of fighters in
Saint Petersburg and supplied them with weapons. Inspired by Gapon1233, he
was at his side on 9 January 1905; But it was also he who, in 1906, by order of
the S.R. party, organises and supervises his assassination (later he will author
a book entitled Gapons Assassination1234). In 1919, he immigrated to Palestine
where he distinguished himself in the electrification of the country. There, he
shows that he is capable of building; but in his early years, in Russia, he
certainly does not work as an engineer, he destroys! One loses the trace of the
student of Zion, irresponsible instigator of the mutiny of Sveaborg, who,
however, escaped the slaughter that ensued.
Apart from the S.R., each year brought with it new socialdemocratic
fighters, theorists, and talkers. Some had shortlived notoriety in narrow circles,
such as Alekandra Sokolovskaya, whom History retained only because she was
Trotskys first wife and the mother of his two daughters. Others have been
unjustly forgotten: Zinovy LitvineSedoi, the chief of staff of the detachments of
the Krasnaya Presnia district during the armed insurrection in Moscow; Zinovy
Dosser, a member of the troika who led this insurrection. Among its leaders,
we can cite again MaratV. L. Chanzer, Lev Kafenhausen, Lubotsky
Zagorsky (who for nearly a century gave his pseudonym1235 to the monastery of
The Trinity Saint Sergius) and Martin MandelstamLiadov, member of the
executive Commission of the RSDLP1236 for the organisation of the armed
insurrection.1237 Otherslike F. Dan or O. Nakhamkiswere to play an
important role later in 1917.
Despite Bakunins aversion for the Jews, there are many of them among the
leaders and theorists of anarchism. But other Russian anarchists, such as
Kropotkin, had no hostility towards the Jews and tried to win them over to their
cause.1238 Among these leaders are Yakov Novomirsky, Alexander Gue, Lev

1232P. Dournovo (18451915), Minister of the Interior in 19051906; P. Shuvalov (1830

1906), Russian diplomat and politician; D. Trepov (18551906), Deputy Minister of the
Interior, one of the leaders of the repression of the revolution of 19051907.
1233G. Gapon (18701906), priest and agent of the secret police, one of the persons
responsible for the massacre of demonstrators in Saint Petersburg, 9 January 1905.
1234RJE, t. 2, p. 517.
1235Zagorsk.
1236Russian SocialDemocratic Labour Party.
1237RJE, t. 1, pp. 436, 468; t. 2, pp. 13, 218.
1238SJE, t. 1, p. 124.
Tcherny, V. Gordine.1239 One of them, I. GrossmanRochin, evokes with the
greatest respect the figure of Aron Eline, of Bialystok: a famous terrorist, but
not only a specialist in gory operations never does he fall into systematic
activism.1240 The least patient among the mass of Jews are looking for a
faster way to achieve socialism. And this recourse, this ambulance, they find
in anarchism.1241 It is the Jews of Kiev and Southern Russia who have been
most attracted to anarchism, and in the documents relating to the Bogrov
affair1242 there is often mention of smallerscale anarchists, forgotten by history.
We have already observed, but it is worth recalling, that it was not only
because of the inequalities of which they were the victims that many Jews were
rushing into the revolution. The participation of the Jews in the revolutionary
movement which had gained the whole of Russia is only partly explained by
their situation of inequality The Jews merely shared the general feeling of
hostility towards the autocracy.1243 Should we be surprised? Young people from
the intelligentsia, both Russian and Jewish, heard in their families, all year long,
only crimes perpetrated by the power, of the government composed of
assassins, and they precipitated the revolutionary action with all the energy of
their fury. Bogrov like the others.
In 1905, the Jewish historian S. Doubnov accused all Jewish
revolutionaries of national treason. In his article entitled Slavery in the
Revolution, he wrote: This entire numerous army of young Jews, who occupy
the most prominent positions in the Social Democratic Party and who run for
positions of command, has formally cut off all ties with the Jewish
community You build nothing new, you are only the valets of the revolution,
or its commissionaires.1244
But as time passed, the approval of the adults to their revolutionary progeny
grew. This phenomenon was intensified among the fathers of the new
generation and was on the whole more marked among the Jews than among the
Russians. Meier Bomach, member of the Duma, declared ten years later (1916):
We do not regret that the Jews participated in the struggle for liberation
They were fighting for your freedom.1245 And six months later, in the
conflagration of the new revolution, in March 1917, the celebrated lawyer O. O.
Gruzenberg held these passionate but not unfounded remarks before the leaders

1239A. Vetlouguine, Avanturisly Grajdanskoy vony (Adventurers of the Civil War), Paris,
Imprimerie Zemgor, 1921, pp. 6567, 85.
1240I. GrossmanRochin, Doumy o bylom (Reflections on the Past) (Iz istorii Belostotskovo,
anarkhitcheskovo, tchemosnamenskovo dvijenia), Byloe, M., 1924, nos. 2728, p. 179.
1241BenKhorin, Anarkhism i ievreskaa massa (Anarchism and the Jewish masses) (St.
Petersburg) Soblazn sotsializma: Revolutsia v Rossi i ievrci / Sost. A. Serebrennikov, Paris,
M., YMCA Press, Rousskii Pout, 1995, p. 453.
1242See infra, Chapter 10.
1243SJE, t. 7, p. 398.
1244Dimanstein, 1905*, op. cit., t. 3, v. 1, p. 174.
1245Mejdounarodnoe finansovo polojenie tsarskoi Rossii vo vremia mirovo vony (The
financial situation of tsarist Russia during the World War), Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1934, t. 64, p.
28.
of the Provisional Government and the Soviet of deputies of workers and
soldiers: We generously offered to the revolution a huge percentage of our
peoplealmost all its flower, almost all its youth And, when in 1905 the
people rose up, countless Jewish fighters came to swell their ranks, carried by
an irresistible impulse.1246 Others will say the same thing: Historical
circumstances made the Jewish masses of Russia unable to not participate in the
most active way in the revolution.1247 For the Jews, the solution of the Jewish
question in Russia was the triumph of progressive ideas in this country.1248
The revolutionary effervescence that had seized Russia was undoubtedly
stirred up by that which reigned among the Jews.
However, youth alone, trained in intellectual or manual labour, could not
make the revolution. One of the top priorities was to win over to the
revolutionary cause, and to lead the industrial workers, and especially those of
Saint Petersburg, to battle. However, as noted by the director of the police
department at the time, at the initial stage of its development, the workers
movement was foreign to political aspirations. And even on the eve of
January 9th, during an extraordinary meeting which they had organised on
December 27th, the workers chased a Jew who tried to make political
propaganda and distribute leaflets, and three Jewish women who sought to
propagate political ideas were apprehended.1249
In order to train the workers of Saint Petersburg, Gapons pseudoreligious
propaganda took place.
On 9 January, even before the troops opened fire, it was the young Simon
Rechtzammer (the son of the director of the Warehouse and Grain Storage
Company) who took the lead of the only barricade erected that day (On the
fourth street of SaintBasils island), with the destruction of the telegraph and
telephone lines and the attack on the police station. Moreover, the workers of
this quarter were employed two days later to copiously beat the
intellectuals.1250
We know that the Russian revolutionaries who immigrated to Europe
welcomed the news of the shooting of Petersburg with a mixture of indignation
and enthusiasm: its about time!! Now its going to blow!! As for the
propagation of this enthusiasmand of the insurrectionin the Pale of
Settlement, it was the tireless Bund who harnessed itself, whose hymn (Anski
said of it that it was The Marseillaise of the Jewish Workers) included the
following words:

1246Retch, 1917, 25 March, p. 6.

1247Dimanstein, 1905, op. cit., p. 175.
1248JE, t. 7, p. 370.
1249Doklad direktora departamenta politsii Lopoukhina ministrou vnoutrennykh del o
sobytiakh 9-vo ianvaria (Report of the Director of the Police Department, Lopoukhine, to
the Minister of the Interior on the events of 9 January), Krasnaya Ictopis, 1922, no. 1, p.
333.
1250V Nevsky, Ianvarskie dni v Peterbourgue v 1905 godou (The Days of January in Petersburg
in 1905), ibidem, pp. 51, 53.
 Enough of loving our enemies, we want to hate them!!
it is ready the pyre! We will find enough logs
For its holy flames to engulf the planet!!1251
(Let us note in passing that The International was translated into Russian
by Arkadi Kotz as early as 1912.1252 Several generations were religiously
imbued with his words: Stand up! The damned of the earth! and of the past let
us make a clean slate)
The Bund immediately issued a proclamation (about two hundred
thousand copies): The revolution has begun. It burned in the capital, its
flames covering the whole country To arms! Storm the armouries and seize
all the weapons Let all the streets become battlefields!1253
According to the Red Chronicle of the Soviet regimes beginnings, the
events of 9 January in Saint Petersburg echoed a great deal in the Jewish
workers movement: they were followed by mass demonstrations of the Jewish
proletariat throughout the Pale of Settlement. At their head was the Bund. To
ensure the massive nature of these demonstrations, detachments of the Bund
went to workshops, factories, and even to the workers homes to call for the
cessation of work; they employed force to empty the boilers of their steam, to
tear off the transmission belts; they threatened the owners of companies, here
and there shots were fired, at Vitebsk one of them received a jet of sulphuric
acid. It was not a spontaneous mass demonstration, but an action carefully
prepared and organised. N. Buchbinder regrets, however, that almost
everywhere the strikes were followed only by the Jewish workers In a whole
series of towns the Russian workers put up a strong resistance to the attempts to
stop factories and plants. There were weeklong strikes in Vilnius, Minsk,
Gomel, Riga, of two weeks in Libava. The police had to intervene, naturally,
and in several cities the Bund constituted armed detachments to combat police
terror.1254 In Krinki (the province of Grodno), the strikers gunned the police,
interrupted telegraphic communications, and for two days all the power was in
the hands of the strike committee. The fact that workers, and among them a
majority of Jews, had thus been able to hold power from the beginning of 1905,
was very significant of what this revolution was, and gave rise to many hopes.
It is no less true that the Bunds important participation in these actions might
lead one to believe that discontent was above all the result of the Jews, while
the other nationalities were not that revolutionary.1255
The strength of the revolutionaries manifested itself through the actions,
carried out in broad daylight, of armed detachments of selfdefence which had
been illustrated during the Gomel pogrom and which had since then grown
considerably stronger. Selfdefence was most often in close contact with the
1251Soblazn Sotsializma, p. 329.
1252RJE, t. 2, p. 70.
1253Dimanstein, 1905, op. cit., p. 144.
1254N. Buchbinder, 9 ianvaria i icvskoye rabotchee dvijenie (On 9 January and Jewish Labour
Movement), Krasnaya Letopis, 1922, no. 1, pp. 8187.
1255Dimanstein, 1905, op. cit., pp. 145, 147.
armed detachments of political organisations It can be said that the whole
Pale of Settlement was covered by a whole network of armed selfdefence
groups which played an important military roleonly a professional army could
face them.1256At the height of the revolution, they were joined by Zionist
groups of various tendencies: the particularly active participation of the Poalei
Zion, as well as armed detachments of the ZS [Zionist Socialists], But also
from SERP. So that in the armed operations that occurred during the
revolution, these socialists belonging to different currents of Zionism found
themselves at our side,1257 remembers S. Dimanstein, later a prominent
Bolshevik leader.
The Bund was to continue its military operations throughout this changing
and uncertain year of 1905. Special mention should be made to the April events
in Jitomir. According to the Jewish Encyclopdia, it was a pogrom against the
Jews, moreover fomented by the police.1258 As for Dimanstein, who boasts of
having actively participated in the 1905 revolution on the territory of the so
called Pale of Settlement, he wrote: It was not a pogrom, but a fight against
the troops of the counterrevolution.1259 The Jewish Encyclopdia indicates
that up to twenty Jews were killed1260; the new one: almost fifty (according to
other sources, about thirtyfive).1261 According to the latter, disorders began
after provocateurs had declared that Jews had fired shots on the portrait of the
tsar outside the city.1262 While The Messenger of the Government gives as a fact
that, two weeks before the pogrom, a crowd of nearly three hundred people
gathered outside the city to practice shooting with revolvers by aiming for
the portrait of His Majesty the Emperor. After this, several brawls broke out
between the Jews and the Christians within the citystill according to The
Messenger of the Government, the aggressors were mostly Jews.1263 According
to the new Jewish Encyclopdia, on the day of the event, the Jewish
detachments of selfdefence heroically resisted the rioters. From a
neighbouring village, a group of young armed Jews came to their rescue, when,
on the way, they were stopped by Ukrainian peasants at Troyanovo. They
tried to take refuge among the Jewish inhabitants of the village, but these did
not let them in and, a characteristic fact, indicated to the peasants where two
of them had been hiding; ten members of the detachment were killed.1264
At the time, a particularly effective manuvre had already been devised:
The funerals of the victims who fell for the revolution constituted one of the
most effective means of propaganda capable of inflating the masses, which had

1256Ibidem, pp. 150151.

1257Ibidem, pp. 123124.
1258SJE, t. 2, p. 513.
1259Dimanstein, 1905, op. cit., p. 144.
1260JE, t. 7, p. 602.
1261SJE, t. 2, p. 513.
1262Ibidem, t. 6, p. 566.
1263Pravo, 5 May 1905, pp. 14831484.
1264SJE, t. 2, p. 513; Dimanstein, 1905, op. cit., pp. 151152.
for consequence that the fighters were aware that their death would be used for
the profit of the revolution, that it would arouse a desire for vengeance among
the thousands of people who were going to attend their funeral, and that on
these occasions it was relatively easier to organise manifestations. The liberal
circles considered it their duty to ensure that the police did not intervene during
a funeral. Thus the funeral became one of the components of revolutionary
propaganda in 1905.1265
In the summer of that year, the police terror was massive, but there were
also many acts of revenge on the part of the workers who threw bombs on
patrols of soldiers or Cossacks, murdered policemen, whether officers or not;
these cases were far from being isolated, because it was a step backwards or
forwards for the revolution in the Jewish sector.1266 Example: the Cossacks
killed a Bund militant in Gomel; eight thousand people attend his funeral,
revolutionary speeches are givenand the revolution advances, always
advances! And when the time came to protest against the convening of the
Boulyguine1267 consultative Duma, the campaign moved from the Stock
Exchange in the Jewish quarter to the synagogues where speakers of the Party
intervened during the service under the protection of armed detachments that
sealed off the exits During these assemblies, it was frequent that resolutions
prepared in advance were adopted without discussionthe unfortunate
faithfuls come to pray, did they have a choice? Go and talk to these fellows!
There is no question of stopping the revolutionary process at this stage1268
The project of convocation of this consultative Duma, which was not
followed up on due to the events of 1905, started from the assumption that they
did not possess it for the designation of municipal selfgovernment bodies, it
had been originally planned to not grant the Jews the right to vote. But the
revolutionary momentum was growing, the Jewish municipal councillors
appointed by the provincial authorities resigned demonstratively here and there,
and the Duma Elections Act of August 1905 already provided for the granting of
voting rights to the Jews. But the revolution continued its course, and public
opinion rejected this consultative Duma, which was therefore not united.
The tension remained high throughout this unhappy year 1905; the
government was overtaken by the events. In the fall, strikes, notably in the
railways, were being prepared everywhere in Russia. And, of course, the Pale of
Settlement was not spared. In the region of the Northwest, during early October,
was seen a rapid rise of the revolutionary energy of the masses, a new
campaign of meetings takes place in the synagogues (always in the same way,
with men posted at exits to intimidate the faithful), we prepare ourselves
feverishly for the general strike. In Vilnius, during a meeting authorised by the
governor, some shot the immense portrait of the Emperor that was there, and

1265Dimanstein, 1905, op. cit., p. 153.

1266Ibidem, p. 164.
1267A. Boulyguine (18511919). Minister of the Interior in 1905.
1268Ibidem, pp. 165166.
some smashed it with chairs; An hour later, it was on the governor in person
that one drewhere it was, the frenzy of 1905! But in Gomel, for example, the
Social Democrats could not agree with the Bund and they acted in disorder;
as for the social revolutionists, they joined the Zionist Socialists; and then
bombs are thrown at the Cossacks, who retaliate by shooting and knocking on
all those who fall under their hand, without distinction of nationality, 1269a
very pretty revolutionary outburst! They were rubbing their hands!
It is not surprising that in many places we could observe welltodo and
religious Jews actively fighting the revolution. They worked with the police to
track down Jewish revolutionaries, to break up demonstrations, strikes, and so
on. Not that it was pleasing to them to find themselves on the side of power.
But, not having detached themselves from God, they refused to witness the
destruction of life. Still less did they accept the revolutionary law: they
venerated their Law. While in Bialystok and other places the young
revolutionaries assimilated the Union of the Jews to the Black Hundreds
because of its religious orientation.1270
According to Dimanstein, the situation after the general strike in October
could be summarised as follows: The Bund, the ZS and other Jewish workers
parties called for insurrection, but there a certain weariness could be
perceived.1271 Later, like the Bolsheviks, the Bund boycotted early in the
19061272 the elections to the first Duma, still caressing the hopes of a
revolutionary explosion. This expectation having been disappointed, it resigned
itself to bring its positions closer to those of the Mensheviks; in 1907, at the
fifth Congress of the RSDLP, of the 305 deputies, 55 were members of the
Bund. And it even became a supporter of extreme Yiddishism.1273
It is in this amped atmosphere, very uncertain for the power in place, that
Witte persuaded Nicholas II to promulgate the Manifesto of 17 October 1905.
(More exactly, Witte wanted to publish it in the form of a simple government
press release, but it is Nicholas II himself who insisted that the promulgation of
the Manifesto, made in the name of the tsar, should assume a solemn character:
he thought he would thus touch the hearts of his subjects.) A. D. Obolensky,
who drew up the initial draft, reported that among the three main points of the
Manifesto there was a special one devoted to the rights and freedoms of the
Jewsbut Witte (doubtlessly at the pressing request of the Emperor) modified
its formulation by addressing in a general way the respect for individuals and
the liberty of conscience, expression, and assembly.1274 The question of the
equal rights of the Jews was therefore no longer mentioned. It was only in the
speech published at the same time than the Manifesto that Witte spoke of the

1269Ibidem, pp. 167168.

1270Ibidem, pp. 173175.
1271Ibidem, pp. 177178.
1272JE, t. 5, pp. 99100.
1273SJE, t. 1, p. 560.
1274Manifest 17 oktiabria (Dokoumenry) (The Manifesto of 17 October [documents]), Krasnyi
arkhiv, 1925, t. 1112, pp. 73, 89.
need to equalise all Russian subjects before the law irrespective of their
confession and nationality.1275
But: we must make concessions only at the right time and in a position of
strengthand this was no longer the case. Liberal and revolutionary opinion
laughed at the Manifesto, seeing it only as a capitulation, and rejected it. The
Emperor, like Witte, was deeply affected, but also certain representatives of the
Jewish intelligentsia: For what the best of the Russians had been waiting for
decades was finally realised In fact, the Emperor willingly surrendered the
autocratic regime and pledged to hand over the legislative power to the
representatives of the people One would have thought that this change would
fill everyone with joybut the news was welcomed with the same
revolutionary intransigence: the struggle continues!1276 In the streets, the
national flag, the portraits of the Emperor and the coat of arms of the State were
torn off.
The account of Wittes interview with the Petersburg press on 18 October,
following the promulgation of the Manifesto, is rich in information. Witte
obviously expected manifestations of gratitude and relied on the friendly
support of the press to calm the spirits, he even openly solicited it. He obtained
only scathing replies, first from the director of the Stock Exchange News, S. M.
Propper, then from Notovitch, Khodski, Arabajine, and Annensky; all demanded
with one voice: proclaim immediately political amnesty! This requirement is
categorical! General Trepov must be dismissed from his post as governor
general of Saint Petersburg. This is the unanimous decision of the press. The
unanimous decision of the press! And to withdraw the Cossacks and the army
from the capital: We shall not publish any more newspapers as long as the
troops are there! The army is the cause of the disorder The security of the
city must be entrusted to the popular militia! (That is to say, to the
detachments of revolutionaries, which meant creating in Petersburg the
conditions for a butchery, as it would soon be in Odessa, or, in the future, to set
up in Petersburg the conditions favourable to the future revolution of February.)
And Witte implored: Let me breathe a little!, Help me, give me a few
weeks!; he even passed among them, shaking hands with each one. 1277 (For his
part, he will remember later: Proppers demands meant for me that the press
had lost its head.) Despite this, the government had intelligence and courage to
refuse the establishment of anarchy and nothing serious happened in the capital.
(In his Memoirs, Witte relates that Propper had arrived in Russia from
abroad, a penniless Jew with no mastery of the Russian language He had
made his mark in the press and had become the head of the Stock Exchange
News, running through the antechambers of influential figures When I was
Minister of Finance, [Propper] begged for official announcements, various
advantages, and eventually obtained from me the title of commercial advisor.

1275SJE, t. 7, p. 349.
1276Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 175.
1277Manifest 17 oktiabria (The Manifesto of 17 October), op. cit., pp. 99105.
However, at this meeting, he formulated, not without a certain insolence,
demands, even declarations like this one: We have no confidence in the
government.1278)
In the course of the same month of October, The Kievian published an
account of an officer returning to Moscow just at that moment, after a year and
a half of captivity in Japan, who was initially moved to tears by the generosity
of the Emperors Manifesto, which opened up favourable prospects for the
country. At the mere sight of this officer in battle dress, the welcome which the
Muscovite crowd received from him was expressed in these terms: Spook!
Suckup! The tsars lackey! During a large meeting in the Theatre Plaza, the
orator called for struggle and destruction; another speaker began his speech by
shouting: Down with the autocracy! His accent betrayed his Jewish origins,
but the Russian public listened to him, and no one found anything to reply to
him. Nods of agreement met the insults uttered against the tsar and his family;
Cossacks, policemen and soldiers, all without exceptionno mercy! And all the
Muscovite newspapers called for armed struggle.1279
In Petersburg, as is well known, a Soviet of the Workers Deputies was
formed on 13 October, headed by the incomparable Parvus and Trotsky, and
with the straw man KhroustalvNossarv as a bonus. This Soviet aimed for the
complete annihilation of the government.
The events of October had even greater and more tragic consequences in
Kiev and Odessa: two great pogroms against the Jews, which must now be
examined. They were the subject of detailed reports of Senate committees of
inquirythese were the most rigorous investigative procedures in Imperial
Russia, the Senate representing the highest and most authoritative judicial
institution and of the greatest independence.

It is Senator Tourau who drafted the report on the Kiev pogrom. 1280 He writes
that the causes of this are related to the troubles that have won the whole of
Russia in recent years, and he supports this assertion by a detailed description
of what preceded it and the course of the facts themselves.
Let us remind that after the events of 9 January in Saint Petersburg, after
months of social unrest, after the infamous defeat against Japan, the imperial
government found nothing better to do to calm the minds than to proclaim on
the 27th of August, the complete administrative autonomy of the higher
education institutions and the territory on which they were located. This
measure had no other result than to turn up the revolutionary heat.
1278Witte, Memoirs, op. cit., t. 2, pp. 5254.
1279Kievlianin, 1905, no. 305: Choulguine*, annexes, op. cit., pp. 271274.
1280Vseppodanechi ottcht o proizvedennom senatorom Tourau izsledovanii pritchin
besporiadkov, byvehikh v gor. Kicvc (Report of Senator Tourau on the causes of the
disorders in the city of Kiev), Materialy k istorii rousskoi kontrrevolutsii, t. 1. Pogromy po
olitsialnym dokoumentam, Saint Petersburg, 1908, pp. 203296.
 It is thus, writes Senator Tourau, that individuals having nothing to do
with the scientific activity of these institutions were free to access them, and
they did so for the purpose of political propaganda. At the University and
Polytechnic of Kiev a series of meetings were organised by the students, to
which participated an external audience, and they were called popular
meetings; a more numerous daytoday public went there: at the end of
September, up to several thousand people. During these meetings, red flags
were displayed, passionate speeches were given about the deficiencies of the
political regime in place, on the necessity of fighting the government; funds
were raised for the purchase of weapons, leaflets were distributed and
brochures on revolutionary propaganda were sold. In midOctober, the
university as well as the Polytechnic Institute had gradually been transformed
into arenas for open and unbridled antigovernment propaganda. Revolutionary
militants who were, until recently, prosecuted by the authorities for organising
clandestine meetings in private places, now felt invulnerable, they hatched
and discussed plans to bring down the existing political system. But even this
did not seem sufficient and the revolutionary action began its expansion: by
attracting the pupils of secondary schools, in other words, high school pupils,
and by moving the field of revolutionary activity: (A Jewish student takes the
floor to denounce the Kishinev pogrom, immediately leaflets are spread out in
the room and cries are heard: Down with the police! Down with the
autocracy!); in some cases at a meeting of the Society of Art and Literature
(windows are broken, we break chairs and staircase ramps to throw them on
peacekeepers). And there was no authority to prevent this: the universities,
autonomous, now had their own law.
The description of these events, supported by the statements of more than
five hundred witnesses, alternates throughout this report with remarks on the
Jews who stand out in the background of this revolutionary crowd. During the
years of the Russian revolution of 19051907, the revolutionary activity of the
Jews increased considerably. No doubt the novelty of the thing made it seem
obvious. The Jewish youth, the report says, dominated by numbers both at
the 9 September meeting at the Polytechnic Institute and during the occupation
of the premises of the Arts and Literary Society; and, also, on 23 September in
the University Hall where up to 5,000 students and persons outside the
university were gathered, with more than 500 women among them. On
October 3rd, at the Polytechnic Institute, nearly 5,000 people gathered with
a Jewish majority of women. The preponderant role of the Jews is mentioned
again and again: at the meetings of 59 October; at the university meeting on
12 October, in which participated employees of the railway administration,
students, individuals of indeterminate professions as well as masses of Jews
of both sexes; on 13 October at the university where nearly 10,000 people
from diverse backgrounds gathered and speeches were delivered by SR. and
Bund militants. (The Jewish Encyclopdia confirms the fact that even beyond
Kiev, during demonstrations celebrating new freedoms, most of the protesters
in the Pale of Settlement were Jews. However, it calls lies the information
according to which, in Ekaterinoslav, they were collecting silver for the
Emperors coffin in the street, and in Kiev they lacerated the portraits of the
Emperor in the premises of the Municipal Duma. 1281 Yet this last fact is
precisely confirmed by the Tourau report.)
In Kiev, in October, the revolutionary movement was gaining momentum.
Alexander Schlichter (future Bolshevik leader, specialist in flour requisitions
and Agriculture Commissioner in Ukraine just before the great organised
famine) fomented a southwestern railway strike, paralysing the trains to
Poltava, Kursk, Voronezh, and Moscow. Threats were made to force the workers
of the Kiev mechanical construction factory to go on strike on 12 October. At
the university, exceptional collections for armaments took place: the
participants threw gold coins, bank notes, silverware, a lady even offered her
earrings. Flying detachments were formed with the mission of interrupting
by force the work in high schools, the factories, the transports, the commerce,
and to prepare the armed resistance to the forces of order. The whole
movement had to take to the streets. On the 14th of October, the newspapers
ceased to appear, with the exception of The Kievian, aligned on the right; only
the telegrammes relating to the liberation movement were allowed to pass. The
flying detachments prevented the trams from rolling, breaking their windows
(some passengers were wounded). At the first appearance of the agitators
everything was closed, everything stopped; the post office closed its doors after
a bomb threat; streams of students and pupils were converging towards the
university at the call of Schlichter, as well as young Jews of various
professions.
It was then that the authorities took the first steps. It was forbidden to meet
in the streets and in public squares, and the cordoning off by the army of the
university and the Polytechnic took place in order for only the students to be
allowed in, arrest of a few individuals for contempt of the police and the
army, of some S.R. and Social Democrats, of the lawyer Ratner, who had
actively participated in popular meetings (Schlichter, him, had taken off). The
trams began to circulate again, the shops reopened their doors, and in Kiev the
days of 16 and 17 October went by peacefully.
It was in this context (which was that of many other places in Russia) that
the Emperor, relying on the gratitude of the population, launched on 17 October
the Manifesto establishing the liberties and a parliamentary system of
government. The news reached Kiev by telegram on the night of the 18th, and
in the morning the text of the Manifesto was sold or distributed in the streets of
the city (as for the newspaper The Kievian, Jewish student youth rushed to buy
it and immediately tear it ostensibly into pieces). The authorities ordered ipso
facto the release of both those who had been arrested in the last days and those
who had previously been charged with assault on the security of the State,
with the exception, however, of those who had used explosives. Both the police
1281SJE, t. 6, p. 567.
and the army had deserted the streets, important rallies were formed, at first
calmly. In the vicinity of the university there was a large crowd of students,
high school pupils and a significant number of young Jews of both sexes.
Giving way to their demands, the rector had the portal of the main building
opened. Immediately the great hall was invaded by a part of the crowd which
destroyed the portraits of the Emperor, tore up the red hangings to make flags
and banners, and some noisily invited the public to kneel before Schlichter by
virtue of victim of arbitrariness. If those who were near him actually fell on
their knees, another part of the public considered that all that had just taken
place was offensive to their national sentiments. Then the crowd went to the
Municipal Duma, and at its head Schlichter pranced around on a horse,
displaying a red band, and at every halt harangued the crowd, claiming that the
struggle against the government was not over. Meanwhile, in the Nicholas
Park, the Jews had thrown a rope around the statue of the Emperor [Nicholas I]
and tried to overthrow it from its pedestal; At another place, Jews wearing red
bands began to insult four soldiers who passed by, spitting on them; the crowd
threw stones on a patrol of soldiers, wounded six, and two demonstrators were
hit by the firing of a riposte. However, the interim mayor was visited by a group
of peaceful citizens who asked for the opening of the meeting room of the
municipal council so that the grateful protesters could express their feelings
about the Manifesto. Their request was met and a peaceful rally was held
under the presidency of the municipal councillor Scheftel. But a new wave,
many thousands of people wearing red badges and ribbons, flocked in; it was
made up of students, people of different social classes, age, sex and condition,
but the Jews were especially noted for it; one party burst into the meeting
room, the others occupied the square in front of the Duma. In a moment all the
national flags which had decorated the Duma on the occasion of the Manifesto
were torn out and replaced by red and black banners. At that moment a new
procession approached, carrying at arms length the lawyer Ratner who had just
gotten out of prison; he called the crowd to release all the other prisoners; on
the balcony of the Duma, Schlichter publicly embraced him. For his part, the
latter exhorted the population to go on a general strike and pronounced
insulting words addressed to the person of the Sovereign. In the meantime, the
crowd had torn the Emperors portraits hung in the assembly hall of the Duma,
and broken the emblems of imperial power which had been placed on the
balcony for the festivities. There is no doubt that these acts were perpetrated
by both Russians and Jews; a Russian worker had even begun to break the
crown, some demanded that it should be put back in its place, but a few
moments later it was again thrown to the ground, this time by a Jew who then
broke in half of the letter N; Another young man, Jewish in appearance,
then attacked the jewels of the diadem. All the furniture of the Duma was
shattered, the administrative documents torn. Schlichter directed the operations:
in the corridors, money was collected for unknown purposes. Excitement in
front of the Duma, however, only increased; perched on the roof of stationary
trams, orators delivered fiery speeches; but it was Ratner and Schlichter who
were the most successful from the balcony of the Duma. An apprentice of
Jewish nationality began shouting from the balcony: Down with the
autocracy!; another Jew, properly dressed: Same to the swine!; Another
Jew, who had cut the tsars head from the picture, reproducing him, introduced
his own by the orifice thus formed, and began to yell at the balcony: I am the
tsar!; the building of the Duma passed completely into the hands of
revolutionary socialist extremists as well as the Jewish youth who had
sympathised with them, losing all control of itself.
I dare say that something stupid and evil has revealed itself in this frantic
jubilation: the inability to remain within certain limits. What, then, prompted
these Jews, in the midst of the delirious plebs, to trample so brutally what the
people still venerated? Aware of the precarious situation of their people and
their families, on 18 and 19 October they could not, in dozens of cities, refrain
from embarking in such events with such passion, to the point of becoming its
soul and sometimes its main actors?
Let us continue reading the Tourau report: Respect for the national
sentiment and the symbols venerated by the people was forgotten. As if a part of
the population did not shy away from any means of expressing its
contempt; the indignities carried out to the portraits of the Emperor excited
an immense popular emotion. Cries came from the crowd gathered in front of
the Duma: Who has dethroned the tsar?, others wept. Without being a
prophet, one could foresee that such offences would not be forgiven to the
Jews, voices rose to express astonishment at the inaction of the authorities;
here and there, in the crowd they began to shout: We must break some
kikes! Near the Duma, the police and an infantry company stood idly by. At
that moment, a squadron of dragoons appeared briefly, greeted by shots from the
windows and the balcony of the Duma; they began to bombard the infantry
company with stones and bottles, to blast it from all sides: the Duma, the Stock
Exchange, the crowd of demonstrators. Several soldiers were wounded; the
captain gave orders to open fire. There were seven dead and one hundred and
thirty wounded. The crowd dispersed. But on the evening of the 18th of
October, the news of the degradations committed on the Emperors portraits,
the crown, the emblems of the monarchy, the national flag, circled the city, and
spread into the suburbs. Small groups of passersby, mostly workers, craftsmen,
merchants, who commented on the events with animation put the full
responsibility for them on the Jews, who always stood out clearly from the other
demonstrators. In the Podol district, the workers crowd decided to seize all
the democrats who had fomented the disturbances and placed them in a
state of arrest pending the orders of His Majesty the Emperor. In the evening,
a first group of demonstrators gathered in the Alexander Plaza, brandishing the
portrait of the Emperor and singing the national anthem. The crowd grew
rapidly and, as many Jews returned from the Krechtchatik with red insignia in
the buttonhole, they were taken for the perpetrators of the disorders perpetrated
in the Duma and became the target of aggressions; some were beaten. This was
already the beginning of the pogrom against the Jews.
Now, to understand both the unpardonable inaction of the authorities during
the sacking of the Duma and the destruction of the national emblems, but also
their even more unpardonable inaction during the pogrom itself, one has to take
a look at what was happening within the organs of power. At first glance, one
might think it was the result of a combination of circumstances. But their
accumulation has been such in Kiev (as well as in other places) that one cannot
fail to discern the mismanagement of the imperial administration of the last
years, the consequences of which were fatal.
As for the governor of Kiev, he was simply absent. ViceGovernor Rafalski
had just taken office, had not had time to find his bearings, and lacked
confidence in the exercise of temporary responsibilities. Above him, Governor
General Kleigels, who had authority over a vast region, had, from the beginning
of October, taken steps to be released from his dutiesfor health reasons. (His
real motivations remain unknown, and it is not excluded that his decision was
dictated by the bubbling revolution of September, which he did not know how
to control.) In any case, he, too, considered himself as temporary, while in
October the directives of the Ministry of the Interior continued to rain on him
10 October: take the most energetic measures to prevent disorder in the street
and to put an end to it by all means in case they occur; 12: repress street
demonstrations, do not hesitate to use armed force; 13: do not tolerate any
rally or gathering in the streets and, if necessary, disperse them by force. On 14
October, as we have seen, the unrest in Kiev has crossed a dangerous limit.
Kleigels brought together his close collaborators, including the Kiev chief of
police, Colonel Tsikhotski, and the deputy head of security (again, the leader
was absent), Kouliabka, a man as agitated as he was ineffective, the very one
who, by stupidity, was about to expose Stolypin to the blows of his assassin. 1282
From the panicked report of the latter stemmed the possibility not only of
demonstrations of armed people in the streets of Kiev, but also of an armed
insurrection. Kleigels, therefore, renounced reliance on the police, put in place
the provisions for recourse to the armed forces to assist the civil authorities
and, on 14 October, handed over his full powers to the military command,
more precisely to the commanderon a temporary basis once again (the
commander himself is absent, but it must be said that the situation is anything
but worrying!)from the Kiev military region, the general Karass. The
responsibility for security in the city was entrusted to General Drake. (Is it not
comical enough: which of the surnames that have just been enumerated makes it
possible to suppose that the action is taking place in Russia?) General Karass
found himself in a particularly difficult situation insofar as he did not know
the data of the situation nor of the staff of the administration and of the
police; By giving him his powers, General Kleigels did not consider it

1282See infra, Chapter 10.

necessary to facilitate the work of his successor; he confined himself to
respecting forms, and at once ceased to deal with anything.
It is now time to talk about the chief of police, Tsikhotski. As early as 1902,
an administrative inspection had revealed that he concealed the practice of
extortion of the Jews in exchange for the right of residence. It was also
discovered that he lived above his means, that he had boughtas well as for
his soninlawproperties worth 100,000 rubles. It was considered that he
should be brought to justice when Kleigels was appointed GovernorGeneral;
very quickly (and, of course, not without having received a large bribe), the
latter intervened so that Tsikhotski was kept at his post and even obtained a
promotion and the title of general. Regarding the promotion, it did not work, but
there were no penalties either, although General Trepov had been working
towards this end from Petersburg. Tsikhotski was informed at the beginning of
October that Kleigels had asked to leave his post at the end of the monthhis
morale fell even lower, he saw himself already condemned. And on the night of
the 18th of October, at the same time as the Imperial Manifesto, the official
confirmation of the retirement of Kleigels came from Saint Petersburg.
Tsikhotski now had nothing to lose. (Another detail: even though the situation
was so troubled, Kleigels left his post even before the arrival of his successor,
who was none other than the pearl of the Imperial administration, General
Sukhomlinov, the future Minister of Defence who scuttled the preparations for
the war against Germany; as for the functions of GovernorGeneral, they were
temporarily assumed by the aforesaid General Karass.) And it was thus that
there was no rapid termination of the confusion that had settled within the
police after the handing over of power to the army, but that it only increased to
manifest itself with the greatest acuity during the disorders.
The fact that Kleigels had renounced his full powers and that these
had been handed over for an indefinite period to the military authorities of the
city of Kiev is mainly at the origin of the uncertain mutual relations which later
established themselves between civil authorities and military authorities; the
extent and limits of the powers [of the army] were not known to anybody and
this vagueness lead to a general disorganisation of services.
This manifested itself from the beginning of the pogrom against the Jews.
Many police officers were convinced that the power had been fully handed
over to the military command and that only the army was competent to act and
to repress the disorders; that is why they did not feel concerned by the
disorders which took place in their presence. As for the army, referring to an
article of the provisions on the use of the armed forces to assist the civil
authorities, it was awaiting indications from the police, considering with reason
that it was not its responsibility to fulfil the missions of the latter: these
provisions stipulated precisely that the civil authorities present at the scene
of the disorders should guide the joint action of the police and the army with a
view to their repression. It was also up to the civil authorities to determine
when to use force. Moreover, Kleigels had not considered it useful to inform
the military command about the situation in the city, nor had he told it what he
knew about the revolutionary movement in Kiev. And this is what made units of
the army begin to scour the city aimlessly.
So, the pogrom against the Jews began in the evening of 18 October. At its
initial stage, the pogrom undoubtedly assumed the character of retaliation
against the offence to national sentiment. The assaults against the Jews passed
in the street, the destruction of shops and the merchandise they contained were
accompanied by words such as: Here it is, your liberty! Here it is, your
Constitution and your revolution! This, this is for the portraits of the tsar and
the crown! The next morning, 19 October, a large crowd came from the Duma
to the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, bearing the empty frames of the Tsars
portraits and the broken emblems of the imperial power. It stopped at the
university to have the damaged portraits restored; a mass was celebrated and
the Metropolitan Flavian exhorted the people not to indulge in excesses and
return home. But while the people who formed the heart of the patriotic
demonstration maintained an exemplary order, individuals who joined them
along the way allowed themselves to be subjected to all kinds of violence
against the Jewish passersby, as well as high school pupils or students in
uniform. They were then joined by the workers, the homeless of the flea
market, the bums; groups of rioters sacked the houses and shops of the Jews,
threw into the street their goods and merchandise, which were partly destroyed
on the spot, partly plundered; the servants, the guardians of buildings, the
little shopkeepers apparently saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of the
property of others; others, on the contrary, remained isolated to all interested
goals until the last day of the disorders, they tore from the hands of their
companions the objects that they had stolen and, without paying attention to
their value, destroyed them on the spot. The rioters did not touch the shops of
the Karaites nor the houses where they were presented portraits of the
Emperor. But, on the whole, only a few hours after it had begun, the pogrom
took the form of a pitiless rampage. On the 18th, it continued long into the
night, then stopped on its own, to resume on the morning of the 19th, and to
cease only on the evening of the 20th. (There were no fires, except one in the
Podol district.) On the 19th, luxury shops belonging to Jews were sacked as far
as the city centre on the Krechtchatik. The heavy metal curtains and the locks
were forced after half an hour of hard work; Expensive textiles, velvet cloths
were thrown into the street and spread out in the mud, in the rain, like rags of no
value. In front of the shop of the jeweller Markisch, on the Krechtchatik, the
pavement was littered with precious objectsand the same for fashion shops,
the dry goods stores; the pavement was fraught with account books, invoices. In
Lipki (the chic neighbourhood) the private mansions of Jews were sacked,
that of Baron Ginzburg, of Halperine, of Alexander and Leon Brodksy, of
Landau, and many more. All the luxurious decoration of these houses was
destroyed, the furniture broken and thrown into the street; likewise, a model
secondary school for the Jews, the Brodsky school, was ravaged, there was
nothing left of the marble staircases and the wrought iron ramps. In all, it was
nearly fifteen hundred apartments and commercial premises belonging to Jews
were plundered. Starting from the fact that nearly twothirds of the citys trade
was in the hands of Jews, Tourau assessed lossesincluding the richest
mansionsto several million rubles. It had been planned to ransack not only
Jewish houses, but also those of prominent liberal personalities. On the 19th,
Bishop Plato led a procession through the streets of Podol where the pogrom
had been particularly violent, urging the people to put an end to the abuses.
Imploring the crowd to spare the lives and property of the Jews, the bishop knelt
several times before it A broken man came out of the crowd and shouted
threateningly: You too, youre for the Jews?
We have already seen the carelessness that prevailed among the authorities.
General Drake did not take appropriate measures to ensure the proper
organisation of security. The troops should not have been scattered in small
detachments, there were too many patrols, and the men often stayed idle.
And here we are: What struck everyone during the pogrom was the obvious
inaction, close to complacency, which was shown by both the army and the
police. The latter was virtually absent, and the troops moved slowly, merely
replying to the shots fired from certain houses, while on either side of the street
the shops and apartments of the Jews were sacked with impunity. A prosecutor
asked a patrol of Cossacks to intervene to protect stores that were looted nearby;
the Cossacks replied that they would not go, that it was not their sector.
More serious still: a whole series of witnesses had the impression that the
police and the army had been dispatched not to disperse the breakers but to
protect them. Here the soldiers declared that they had been ordered to ensure
that there were no clashes and that the Russians were not attacked. Elsewhere
they said that if they had taken an oath to God and to the tsar, it was not to
protect those who had lacerated and jeered at the portraits of the tsar. As for
the officers, they considered themselves powerless to prevent disorders, and
felt themselves entitled to use force only in cases where the violence was
directed against their men. Example: of a house ran out a Jew covered with
blood, pursued by the crowd. An infantry company was right there, but it paid
no attention to what was going on and quietly went up the street. Elsewhere,
the plunderers were massacring two Jews with table legs; a detachment of
cavalry stationed ten paces away contemplated placidly the scene. It is not
surprising that the man in the street could have understood things like this: The
tsar graciously granted us the right to beat the kikes for six days; and the
soldiers: You see, is all this conceivable without the approval of the
authorities? For their part, the police officers, when they were demanded to
put an end to the disorders, objected that they could do nothing to the extent that
the full powers had been transferred to the military command. But there was
also a large crowd of thugs that took flight due to a police commissioner who
brandished his revolver, assisted by only one peacekeeper, and police officer
Ostromenski, with three patrolmen and some soldiers, succeeded in preventing
acts of looting in his neighbourhood without even resorting to force.
The looters did not have firearms, while the young Jews, they, had some.
However, unlike what happened in Gomel, here the Jews had not organised
their selfdefence, even though shots were fired from many houses by
members of selfdefence groups who included in their ranks both Jews and
Russians who had taken their part; It is undeniable that in some cases these
shots were directed against the troops and constituted acts of retaliation for the
shots fired on the crowd during the demonstrations of the previous days;
Sometimes Jews fired on the patriotic parades organised in response to the
revolutionary demonstrations that had taken place before. But these shots had
deplorable consequences. Without producing any effect on the rioters, they gave
the troops a pretext to apply their instructions to the letter; as soon as shots
came from a house, the troops who were there, without even inquiring whether
they were directed against them or against the rioters, sent a salvo into its
windows, after which the crowd rushed in and ransacked it. We saw cases
where we were firing at a house solely because someone had claimed that shots
had gone; it also happened that the looters climbed the stairs of a house and
fired shots towards the street to provoke the troops retaliation and then engage
in plundering.
And things got worse. Some of the policemen and soldiers did not disdain
the goods thrown into the street by the vandals, picked them up and hid them in
their pockets or under their hoods. And, although these cases were
exceptional and punctual, one still saw a police officer dismantling the door of
a shop himself, and a corporal imitating him. (The false rumours of looting by
the army began to circulate when General Evert ordered in his area to confiscate
goods taken by the looters and stolen goods and to transport them to the
warehouses of the army for subsequent restitution to their owners on
presentation of a receipt, thus saving property worth several tens of thousands
of rubles.)
It is hardly surprising that this scoundrel of Tsikhotski, seeing his career
broken, not only did not take any action concerning the action of the police
(having learned of the beginning of the pogrom on the evening of the 18th, he
did not communicate by telegram any information to the neighbourhood police
stations before late in the evening on the 19th), not only did he not transmit any
information to the generals of military security, but he himself, passing through
the city, had considered what was going on with calm and indifference,
contenting himself to say to the plunderers: Move along, gentlemen (and
those few, encouraged one another: Do not be afraid, hes joking!); and when,
from the balcony of the Duma, they began to shout: Pound the kikes, plunder,
break! And the crowd then carried the chief of police in triumph, the latter
addressed greetings in response to the cheering of the demonstrators. It was
not until the 20th, after General Karass had sent him a severe warning (as to the
Director of the GovernorGenerals Chancery, he declared that Tsikhovsky
would not escape the penal colony), that he ordered the police to take all
measures to put an end to the pogrom. Senator Tourau effectively had to bring
him to justice.
Another security official, disgruntled with his career, General Bessonov,
was in the midst of the crowd of rioters and was peacefully parleying with
them: We have the right to demolish, but it is not right to steal. The crowd
shouted: Hurray! At another moment he behaved as an indifferent witness to
the plunder. And when one of the breakers shouted: Slam the kikes!
[Bessonov] reacted with an approving laugh. He reportedly told a doctor that
if he had wanted to, he could have put an end to the pogrom in half an hour,
but the Jews participation in the revolutionary movement had been too great,
they had to pay the price. After the pogrom, summoned by the military
authorities to explain himself, he denied having spoken favourably of the
pogrom and declared, on the contrary, to have exhorted people to return to calm:
Have mercy on us, do not force the troops to use their weapons to shed
Russian blood, our own blood!
Delegations went one after the other to General Karass, some requesting
that some of them take troops out of the city, others for the use of force, and
others for taking measures to protect their property. However, throughout the
day of the 19th, the police did nothing and the military executed orders badly.
On 20 October, Karass ordered to encircle and apprehend the hooligans.
Many arrests were made; once, the army opened fire on the rioters, killing five
and wounding several others. By the evening of the 20th, the pogrom was
definitely over, but late in the evening the rumour that the Jews murdered
Russians sowed dismay among the population; retaliation was feared.
During the pogrom, according to police estimates (but a number of victims
were taken by the crowd), there were a total of 47 deaths, including 12 Jews,
and 205 wounded, onethird of them Jews.
Tourau concludes his report by explaining that the root cause of the Kiev
pogrom lies in the traditional enmity between the population of Little Russia
and the Jewish population, motivated by differences of opinion. As for its
immediate cause, it resides in the outrage of national sentiment caused by the
revolutionary manifestations to which the Jewish youth had taken an active
part. The working class imputed to the Jews only the responsibility for the
blasphemies uttered against what was most sacred to them. They could not
understand, after the grace granted by the Emperor, the very existence of the
revolutionary movement, and explained it by the desire of the Jews to obtain
their own liberties. The flip side of the war in which Jewish youth had
always openly expressed its deepest satisfaction, its refusal to fulfil its military
obligations, its participation in the revolutionary movement, acts of violence
and the killings of agents of the State, its insulting attitude towards the armed
forces all this incontestably provoked exasperation towards the Jews among
the working class, and this is why in Kiev there have been several cases
where many Russians gave open shelter to unfortunate Jews who fled from the
violence, but categorically refused Jewish youth.
As for the newspaper The Kievian, it wrote1283: Poor Jews! Where is the
fault of these thousands of families? For their misfortune, these poor Jews
could not control their brainless youngsters But brainless youngsters, there
are also some among us, the Russians, and we could not control them either!
The revolutionary youth scoured the countryside, but it was the peaceful
adult Jews who had to pay the piper.
Thus, on both sides, we have dug a bottomless abyss.

As for the Odessa pogrom, we have a similar and equally detailed report, that of
Senator Kozminski.1284
In Odessa, where a lively revolutionary sentiment had always existed, the
tremors had started since January; the blast took place on the 13th of June
(independently, therefore, of the arrival of the Potemkin battleship in the
harbour of Odessa on the 14th). The entire day of the 14th of June passed in
turmoil, especially among the young, but this time also among the workers,
whose numerous crowds began to impose by force the cessation of work in
plants and factories. A crowd of about three hundred people attempted to
break into a [tea] parlour Several shots were fired at the head of the local
police station, who was preventing the crowd from entering, but the latter was
dispersed by a salvo shot by a detachment of policemen. However, the crowd
soon reformed, and proceeded to the police station; some shots were fired
from the Doks house: from the windows and the balcony, several shots were
fired at the police officers. Another group erected a barricade with building
materials in the street, and then began shooting at a police detachment. In
another street, a crowd of the same kind overturned several tramway wagons
with horses. A fairly large group of Jews broke into a tin factory, threw
tobacco in the eyes [of a police officer], scattered at the appearance of a
police detachment while opening fire with revolvers; among them four Jews
[their names follow] were arrested on the spot; at a crossroads, a gathering of
Jews was formed, [two of them] fired revolver shots at a mounted guard; in
general, throughout the day of 14 June, almost all the streets of the city were the
scene of clashes between Jews and the security forces, during which they used
firearms and projectiles, wounding several police officers. A dozen Jews were

1283Kievlianin, 1905, nos. 290, 297, 311, 317, 358, in Choulguine, annexes, op. cit., pp. 286
302.
1284Vseppodanischi ottehel senatora Kuzminskovo o pritchinakh bezporiadkov,
proiskhodivehikh v r. Odcssc v oktiabre 1905 g., Io poriadke destvi m mestnykh vlaslei
(Report by Senator Kouzminski on the causes of the disorders in the city of Odessa in
October 1905 and on the actions carried out by the local authorities), Kievskii i odcsskii
pogromy v ottehetakh senatorov Tourau i Kouzminskovo. SPb., Letopissets, (1907), pp.
111220.
also wounded, which the crowd took to hide them. As he tried to escape, a
certain Tsipkine threw a bomb, causing his own death as well as that of police
officer Pavlovski.
It was at this time that the Potemkin entered the Odessa harbour! A crowd
of nearly five thousand people assembled, many men and women gave
speeches calling the people for an uprising against the government; among the
students who got aboard the battleship were Konstantin Feldman (who urged to
support the movement in town by cannonading it, but the majority of the crew
opposed it).
And the authorities in all this? The governor of Odessain other words,
the head of the policeNeudhart, was already completely distraught on the day
of the arrival of the Potemkin; he felt (as in Kiev) that the civil authorities were
unable to restore order, and that is why he had handed over all subsequent
decisions aimed at the cessation of disorder to the military command, that is to
say, the commander of the Odessa garrison, General Kakhanov. (Did there exist
a superior authority to that one in Odessa? Yes, of course, and it was Governor
General Karangozov, who, as the reader will have guessed, was acting on a
temporary basis, and felt hardly at ease.) General Kakhanov found nothing
better than to have the port sealed by the army and to enclose the thousands of
unsafe elements who had gathered there to cut them offnot yet
contaminatedfrom the city.
On 15 June, the uprising in Odessa and the Potemkin mutiny collapsed into
one movement: the inhabitants of the city, among whom many students and
workers boarded the battleship, exhorting the crew to common actions. The
crowd in the harbour rushed to plunder the goods that were stored there,
beginning with the boxes of wine; then stormed the warehouses to which it set
fire (more than 8 million rubles of losses). The fire threatened the quarantine
port where foreign vessels were anchored and import goods were stored.
Kakhanov still could not resolve to put an end to the disorder by force, fearing
that the Potemkin would reply by bombarding the city. The situation remained
equally explosive on the 15th. The next day the Potemkin drew five salvos on
the town, three of them blank, and called on the commander of the armed forces
to board the ship to demand the withdrawal of the troops from the city and the
release of all political prisoners. On the same day, 16 June, at the funeral of the
only sailor killed, scarcely had the procession entered the town than it was
joined by all kinds of individuals who soon formed a crowd of several thousand
persons, principally young Jews, and on the grave an orator, after shouting
Down with the autocracy!, called on his comrades to act with more
determination, without fear of the police.
But that very day, and for a long time, the state of siege was proclaimed in
the city. The Potemkin had to take off to escape the squadron that had come to
capture it. And although the four days it had been anchored in the port Odessa
and the many contacts which had been established between the people and it
substantially raised the morale of the revolutionaries and gave rise to the hope
of a possible future support of the armed forces, despite of that the summer
was going to end calmly, perhaps even no upset would have occurred in Odessa
if, on the 27th of August, had been promulgated the incomparable law on the
autonomy of higher education institutions! Immediately, a soviet coalition
was formed by the students, which, by its determination and audacity,
succeeded in bringing under its influence not only the student community but
also the teaching force (professors feared unpleasant confrontations with the
students, such as the boycott of classes, the expulsion of such and such
professor from the amphi, etc.).
Large gatherings took place at the university, fundraising to arm the
workers and the proletariat, for the military insurrection, for the purchase of
weapons with a view to forming militias and selfdefence groups, discussions
were held about the course of action to be taken at the time of the insurrection.
At these meetings the faculty of professors took an active part, sometimes
with the rector Zantchevski at its head, who promised to make available to the
students all the means at their disposal to facilitate their participation in the
liberation movement.
On 17 September, the first meeting at the university took place in the
presence of an outside public so numerous that it had to be split into two
groups; The S.R. Teper and two Jewish students made speeches calling on
the public to lead the struggle to free the country from political oppression and a
deleterious autocracy. On 30 September, the state of siege was lifted in Odessa
and henceforth rushed to these meetings students of all educational
establishments, some of whom were not more than fourteen years old; the Jews
were the principal orators, calling for open insurrection and armed struggle.
On 12 and 13 October, before all other secondary schools, the pupils of
two business schools, that of the Emperor Nicholas I and that of Feig, ceased to
attend classes, being the most sensitive to revolutionary propaganda; on the
14th, it was decided to halt the work in all the other secondary schools, and
business schools and the students went to all the high schools of the city to
force the pupils to go on course strikes. The rumour went around that in front of
the Berezina high school, three students and three high school students had been
wounded with swords by police officers. Certainly, the investigation would
establish with certainty that none of the young people had been affected and that
the pupils had not yet had time to leave the school. But this kind of incident,
what a boon to raise the revolutionary pressure! On the same day, the courses
ceased at the university, fortyeight hours after the start of the school year; the
striking students burst into the municipal Duma shouting: Death to Neudhart!
and demanding that they stop paying salaries to the police.
After the episode of the Potemkin, Neudhart had regained power in his
hands, but until the middle of October he did not make any measure against the
revolutionary meetingsbesides, could he do very much when the autonomy of
universities had been established? On the 15th he received orders from the
Ministry of the Interior to prohibit the entrance of outsiders to the university,
and on the following day he surrounded the latter by the army, while ordering
the cartridges to be taken out from the armouries, until then sold overthe
counter. The closure of the university to the outside world provoked great
agitation among Jewish students and Jewish youth, an immense crowd set out,
closing the shops on its way (the American armoury was plundered),
overturning streetcars and omnibuses, sawing trees to make barricades, cutting
off telegraph and telephone wires for the same purpose, dismantling the gates of
the parks. Neudhart asked Kakhanov to have the town occupied by the troops.
Then, the barricades behind which the demonstrators had gatheredmostly
Jews, among them women and adolescents, they began to fire on the troops;
shots were fired from the roofs of houses, balconies, and windows; the army
opened fire in its turn, the demonstrators were scattered and the barricades
dismantled. It is impossible to accurately estimate the number of deaths and
injuries that occurred on that day, as the health teamconsisting mainly of
Jewish students in redwhite blouses with a red crosshurried to take the
wounded and the dead to the university infirmarythus in an autonomous and
inaccessible zone, at the Jewish hospital or at the emergency stations near
the barricades, as well as in almost all pharmacies. (They had stopped
delivering medicine even before the events.) According to the governor of the
city, there were nine deaths, nearly 80 wounded, including some policemen.
Among the participants in the disorders were apprehended that day 214 people,
of whom 197 Jews, a large number of women, and 13 children aged 12 to 14
years.
And all this, still twentyfour hours before the incendiary effect of the
Manifesto was felt.
One might think that by exposing the role of the Jews so frequently in
revolutionary movements, the Senates report was biased. But it must be borne
in mind that in Odessa the Jews represented onethird of the population, and, as
we have seen, a very significant proportion of the student population; it must
also be borne in mind that the Jews had taken an active part in the Russian
revolutionary movement, especially in the Pale of Settlement. In addition,
Senator Kouzminskis report provides evidence of its objectivity in many
places.
On 16 October, when they arrived at the police station, the people arrested
were victims of assault by the police and soldiers; however, neither the
governor of the city nor the police officials responded in due course and no
investigation was carried out; it was not until later that more than twenty of
those who had been in this precinct declared that those arrested had been
systematically beaten; first they were pushed down a staircase leading to the
basement many of them fell to the ground and it was then that policemen and
soldiers, arranged in a row, beat them with the back of their sabres, rubber
truncheons, or simply their feet and fists; the women were not spared. (It is
true that, on the same evening, municipal councillors and justices of the peace
went to the scene and gathered complaints from the victims. As for the senator,
he identified several culprits during his inquiry in November and had them
brought to justice.)
On the 17th of October, the whole town was occupied by the army, patrols
were criss-crossing the streets, and public order was not troubled all day.
However, the Municipal Duma had met to discuss emergency measures,
including how to replace the state police with an urban militia. On the same day,
the Bunds local committee decided to organise a solemn funeral for the victims
who had fallen the day before on the barricades, but Neudhart, understanding
that such a demonstration would cause, as always, a new revolutionary
explosion, gave the order to remove in secret, of the Jewish hospital where
they were, the five corpses and to bury them before the scheduled date, which
was done on the night of 18. (The next day the organisers demanded that the
corpses be unearthed and brought back to the hospital. Due to the developments
of events, the bodies were embalmed there and remained in that state for a long
time.) And it was at this time that the news of the Imperial Manifesto spread,
pushing Odessa towards new storms.
Let us quote first of all the testimony of members of a Jewish selfdefence
detachment: During the pogrom, there was a certain coordination centre that
worked quite well Universities played an enormous role in the preparation of
the events of October the soviet coalition of the Odessa University included
a Bolshevik, a Menshevik, an S.R., a representative of the Bund, Zionist
Socialists, the Armenian communities, Georgian and Polish ones as well.
Student detachments were formed even before the pogrom; during immense
meetings at the university, money was collected to buy weapons, of course
not only to defend ourselves, but with a view to a possible insurrection. The
soviet coalition also raised funds to arm the students; when the pogrom broke
out, there were two hundred revolvers at the university, and a professor
procured another hundred and fifty others. A dictator was appointed at the
head of each detachment without taking into account his political stance, and
it happened that a detachment composed mainly of members of the Bund was
commanded by a ZionistSocialist, or vice versa; on Wednesday [19 October],
a large quantity of weapons were distributed in a proZionist synagogue; the
detachments were made up of Jewish and Russian students, Jewish workers,
young Jews of all parties, and a very small number of Russian workers.1285
A few years later, Jabotinsky wrote that during the pogroms of the year
1905 the new Jewish soul had already reached its maturity. 1286 And in the still
rosetinted atmosphere of the February Revolution, a major Russian newspaper
gave the following description: When, during the Neudhart pogroms in 1905,
the young militiamen of selfdefence travelled through Odessa, weapons in their

1285Odesskii pogrom i samooborona (The Odessa pogrom and selfdefence), Paris, Zapadnyi
Tsentralnyi Komitet Samooborony Poalei Zion, 1906, pp. 5052.
1286V. Jabotinsky, Vvedenic (Preface), in K. N. Bialik. Pesni i poemy, op. cit., p. 44.
fists, they aroused emotion and admiration, we were heavyhearted, we were
touched and full of compassion1287
And this is what one of our contemporaries wrote: The courage shown by
Gomels fighters inflames tens of thousands of hearts. In Kiev, 1,500 people are
engaged in selfdefence detachments, in Odessa several thousands. 1288 But in
Odessa, the number of combatants as well as their state of mindand, in
response, the brutality of the police forcesgave a much different turn to events
than they had experienced in Kiev.
Let us go back to the Kuzminski report. After the proclamation of the
Manifesto, on the morning of the 18th, General Kaoulbars, commanding the
military district of Odessa, in order to give the population the possibility of
enjoying without restrictions the freedom in all its forms granted by the
Manifesto, ordered the troops not to appear in the streets, so as not to disturb
the joyous humour of the population. However, this joyous mood did not
last. On all sides groups of Jews and students began to flock towards the city
centre, brandishing red flags and shouting: Down with the autocracy!, while
speakers called for revolution. On the faade of the Duma, two of the words
forming the inscription in metal letters God save the Tsar were broken; the
Council Chamber was invaded, a large portrait of His Majesty the Emperor
was torn to shreds, the national flag which floated on the Duma was replaced
by a red flag. The headdresses of three ecclesiastics, who were in a cab at a
funeral, were stolen; later, the funeral procession they conducted was repeatedly
stopped, religious songs interrupted by cheers. There was a headless
scarecrow bearing the inscription Here is the Autocracy, and a dead cat was
showed off while collecting money to demolish the tsar or for Nicholass
death. The young people, especially the Jews, who were obviously aware of
their superiority, taught the Russians that their freedom had not been freely
granted to them, that it had been torn from the government by the Jews They
declared openly to the Russians: Now we are going to govern you, but also:
We have given you God, we will give you a tsar. A large crowd of Jews
waving red flags long pursued two peacekeepers, one of them managed to
escape by the roofs, while on the other, a man named Goubiy, the crowd armed
with revolvers, axes, stakes, and iron bars, found him in an attic, and hurt him
so badly that he died during his transport to the hospital; the concierge of the
building found two of his fingers cut by axe. Later, three police officers were
beaten and wounded, and the revolvers of five peacekeepers were confiscated.
The prisoners were then freed in one, two, and three police stations (where on
the 16th there had been beatings, but the detainees had already been released on
the orders of Neudhart; in one of these precincts, the liberation of the prisoners
was negotiated in exchange for Goubiys corpse; sometimes there was nobody
behind bars. As for the rector of the university, he actively participated in all
this, transmitting to the prosecutor the demands of a crowd of five thousand

1287D. Aizman, Iskouchenie (Temptation), Rousskaa volia, 29 April 1917, pp. 23.
1288Praisman, in 22, op. cit., p. 179.
people, while the students went so far as to threaten to hang the police
officers. Neudhart solicited the advice of the mayor of the city, Kryjanovsky,
and a professor at the university, Shtchepkin, but they only demanded that he
disarm the police on the spot and make it invisible, otherwise, added
Shchepkin, the victims of popular revenge cannot be saved, and the police will
be legitimately disarmed by force. (Interrogated later by the senator, he denied
having spoken so violently, but one can doubt his sincerity in view of the fact
that on the same day he had distributed 150 revolvers to the students and that,
during the inquiry, he refused to say where he had procured them.) After this
interview, Neudhart ordered (without even warning the chief of police) to
withdraw all the peacekeepers in such a way that from that moment the whole
of the city was deprived of any visible police presencewhich could have
been understood if the measure had been intended to protect the life of the
agents, but at the same time, the streets had been deserted by the army, which,
for the moment, was pure stupidity. (But we remember that in Petersburg this
was precisely what the press owners demanded from Witte, and it had been
difficult for him to resist them.)
After the police left, two types of armed groups appeared: the student
militia and the Jewish selfdefence detachments. The first was set up by the
soviet coalition which had procured arms. Now, the municipal militia, made
up of armed students and other individuals, placed themselves on guard instead
of policemen. This was done with the assent of General Baron Kaulbars and the
governor of the city, Neudhart, while the police chief, Golovin, offered his
resignation in protest and was replaced by his deputy, von Hobsberg. A
provisional committee was set up at the Municipal Duma; in one of his first
statements, he expressed his gratitude to the students of the university for their
way of ensuring the security of the city with energy, intelligence, and devotion.
The committee itself assumed rather vague functions. (During the month of
November the press took an interest in one of the members of this committee,
also a member of the Duma of the Empire, O. I. Pergament, and in the second
Duma somebody had to recall that he proclaimed himself President of the
Republic of the Danube and the Black Sea, or President of the Republic of
South Russia,1289 in the intoxication of those days, this was not unlikely.)
And what could happen after the streets had been deserted, during these
feverish days, by both the army and the police, and that the power had passed
into the hands of an inexperienced student militia and groups of selfdefence?
The militia arrested persons who seemed suspicious to it and sent them to the
university for examination; here a student walked at the head of a group of
Jews of about sixty persons who fired revolver shots at random; the student
militia and Jewish selfdefence groups themselves perpetrated acts of violence
directed against the army and peaceful elements of the Russian population,
using firearms and killing innocent people.

1289Gossudarstvennaya DumaVtoroy Sozyv (The Duma of Elaisecond convocation),

Slenogralitcheski ollchel, p. 2033.
 The confrontation was inevitable, given the crystallisation of two
antagonistic camps among the population. On the evening of the 18th, a
crowd of demonstrators waving red flags, and composed predominantly of
Jews, tried to impose a stoppage of work at the factory at Guen The workers
refused to comply with this demand; after which the same crowd, crossing
Russian workmen in the street, demanded that they should uncover themselves
before the red flags. As the latter refused,well here it is, the proletariat!
from the crowd shots were fired; the workers, though unarmed, succeeded in
dispersing it, and pursued it until it was joined by another crowd of armed
Jews, up to a thousand people, who began to fire on the workmen; four of
them were killed. This is how brawls and armed clashes between Russians and
Jews were unleashed at various points in the city; Russian workers and
individuals without any definite occupation, also known as hooligans, began to
chase the Jews and to beat them up, and then move on with the rampage and
destruction of houses, apartments and shops belonging to Jews. It was then that
a police commissioner called an infantry company which put an end to the
clashes.
On the following day, 19 October, towards 10, 11 in the morning, there
were seen forming in the streets crowds of Russian workers and persons of
various professions carrying icons, portraits of His Majesty the Emperor, as well
as the national flag, and singing religious hymns. These patriotic demonstrations
composed exclusively of Russians were formed simultaneously at several
locations in the city, but their starting point was in the port from where set off a
first manifestation of workmen, especially numerous. There exists reasons to
assert that the anger provoked by the offensive attitude of the Jews over the
whole of the previous day, their arrogance and their contempt for the national
sentiment shared by the Russian population had to, in one way or another, lead
to a reaction of protest. Neudhart was not ignorant of the fact that a
demonstration was being prepared and he authorised it, and it passed under the
windows of the commander of the military district and the governor of the city,
and then proceeded to the cathedral. As it went on, the crowd was swollen by
the addition of passersby, including a large number of hooligans, tramps,
women and adolescents. (But it is appropriate here to draw a parallel between
the story of a member of the Poalei Zion: The pogrom of Odessa was not the
work of hooligans During these days the police did not allow entrance to the
city to the tramps of the port,; it was the small artisans and the small
merchants who gave free rein to their exasperation, the workers and apprentices
of various workshops, plants, or factories, Russian workers lacking political
consciousness; I went to Odessa only to see a pogrom organised by
provocation, but, alas, I did not find it! And he explains it as hatred between
nationalities.1290)
Not far from the Cathedral Square, several shots were fired towards the
crowd of protesters, one of them killed a little boy who was carrying an icon;
1290Odesski pogrom (The pogrom of Odessa), Poalei Zion. pp. 6465.
the infantry company who arrived on the spot was also greeted by gunfire.
They fired from the windows of the editorial office of the newspaper Yuzhnoye
Obozrenie, and during the entire route of the procession gunshots came from
windows, balconies, roofs; moreover, explosive devices were launched in
several places on the demonstrators, six people were killed by one of them;
in the centre of Odessa, at the corner of Deribassov and Richelieu, three bombs
were thrown on a squadron of Cossacks. There were many deaths and
wounded among the demonstrators, not without reason the Russians blamed
the Jews, and it is why shouts merged quickly from the crowd: Beat up the
kikes!, Death to the heebs!, and at various points in the city the crowd
rushed to the Jewish shops to plunder them; these isolated acts were rapidly
transformed into a generalised pogrom: all the shops, houses and apartments of
the Jews on the path of the demonstration were completely devastated, all their
property destroyed, and what had escaped the vandals was stolen by the cohorts
of hooligans and beggars who had followed the lead of the protesters; it was
not uncommon for scenes of looting to unfold under the eyes of demonstrators
carrying icons and singing religious hymns. On the evening of the 19th, the
hatred of the antagonist camps reached its peak: each one hit and tortured
mercilessly, sometimes with exceptional cruelty, and without distinction of sex
or age, those who fell into their hands. According to the testimony of a doctor
at the university clinic, hooligans threw children from the first or second floor
onto the road; one of them grabbed a child by the feet and smashed his skull
against the wall. For their part, the Jews did not spare the Russians, killing those
they could at the first opportunity; during the day they did not show themselves
in the streets, but fired on the passersby from the doors, from the windows,
etc., but in the evening they met in numerous groups, going as far as
besieging police stations. The Jews were particularly cruel with police
officers when they managed to catch them. (Here is now the point of view of
the Poalei Zion: The press spread a legend that selfdefence had taken a huge
crowd of hooligans and locked them up in the university premises. Numbers in
the order of 800 to 900 individuals were cited; it is in fact necessary to divide
this number by ten. It was only at the beginning of the pogrom that the vandals
were brought to the university, after which things took a completely different
turn.1291 There are also descriptions of the Odessa pogrom in the November
1905 issues of the newspaper The Kievian.1292)
And what about the police, in all this? In accordance with Neudharts
stupid dispositions, on 19 October as on the following days, the police were
totally absent from the streets of Odessa: a few patrols, and only occasionally.
The vagueness that reigned in the relations between civil authorities and
military authorities, which ran counter to the legal provisions, had the
consequence that the police officers did not have a very clear idea of their
obligations; even more, all the police officers, considering that the

1291Ibidem, p. 53.
1292The Kievlianin, 14 Nov. 1905, in Choulguine, annexes, op. cit., pp. 303308.
responsibility for the political upheavals was incumbent on the Jews and that
these were revolutionaries, felt the greatest sympathy for the pogrom which
was unfolding before their eyes and judged even superfluous to conceal
themselves. Worse: In many cases, police officers themselves incited
hooligans to ransack and loot Jewish houses, apartments, and shops; and at the
height of it: in civilian clothes, without their insignia, they themselves took
part in these rampages, directed the crowd, and there were even cases
where police officers fired on the ground or in the air to make the military
believe that these shots came from the windows of houses belonging to Jews.
And it was the police who did that!
Senator Kouzminski brought to trial fortytwo policemen, twentythree of
whom were officers.
And the armyscattered over the immense territory of the city and
supposed to act autonomously? The military also did not pay any attention to
the pogroms, since they were not aware of their exact obligations and were not
given any indication by the police officers, they did not know against whom
or according to what order they should use armed force; on the other hand, the
soldiers could assume that the pogrom had been organised with the approval of
the police. Consequently, the army took no action against the vandals. Worse
still, there is evidence that soldiers and Cossacks also took part in the looting
of shops and houses. Some witnesses affirmed that soldiers and Cossacks
massacred innocent people for no reason.
Again, these are innocent people who have paid for others.
On 20 and 21 October, far from subsiding, the pogrom gained frightening
momentum; the plunder and destruction of Jewish property, the acts of
violence and the killings were openly perpetrated, and with complete impunity,
day and night. (Point of view of the Poalei Zion: on the evening of the 20th,
the university was closed by the army while inside it, we had barricaded
ourselves in the event of an assault by the troops. Detachments of selfdefence
no longer went into town. In the latter, on the other hand, selfdefence had
organised itself spontaneously, powerful detachments of townspeople,
equipped with weapons of opportunity: hatchets, cutlasses, limes, defended
themselves with determination and anger equal to those they were victims of,
and succeeded in protecting their perimeter almost completely.1293
On the 20th, a group of municipal councillors headed by the new mayor
(the former Kryjanovsky, who noted his powerlessness in the face of what was
happening in the university, where even weapons were being gathered, and had
resigned on the 18th) went to General Kaulbars, urging him to take all the
power in his hands to the extent that the military command alone is capable
of saving the city. The latter explained to them that before the declaration of
the state of siege, the military command had no right to interfere in the
decisions of the civil administration and had no other obligation than to assist
it when it requested it. Not to mention that the firing of the troops and the
1293Odesski pogrom (The pogrom of Odessa), Poalei Zion, pp. 5354.
bombs thrown at them made it extremely difficult to restore order. He finally
agreed to intervene.On the 21st of October he gave orders to take the most
energetic measures against the buildings from which shots were fired and
bombs were thrown. On the 22nd: order to take down on the spot all those who
guilty of attacks on buildings, businesses or persons. As early as the 21st, calm
began to return to different parts of the city; from the 22nd, the police ensured
the surveillance of the streets with the reinforcement of the army; the
streetcars began to circulate again and in the evening, one could consider that
the order was restored in the city.
The number of victims was difficult to define and varies from one source to
another. The Kuzminski report states that according to information provided by
the police, the number of people killed amounts to more than 500 persons,
including more than 400 Jews; as to the number of injuries recorded by the
police, it is 289, of which 237 Jews. According to the data collected from the
cemetery guardians, 86 funerals were celebrated in the Christian cemetery, 298
in the Jewish cemetery. In the hospitals were admitted 608 wounded,
including 392 Jews. (However, many had to be those who refrained from going
to hospitals, fearing that they would later be prosecuted.)The Jewish
Encyclopdia reports 400 deaths among the Jews.1294According to the Poalei
Zion: based on the list published by the rabbinate of Odessa, 302 Jews were
killed, including 55 members of selfdefence detachments, as well as 15
Christians who were members of these same detachments; among the other
deaths, 45 could not be identified; 179 men and 23 women were identified.
Many deaths among the vandals; no one counted them, nor cared to know their
number; in any event, it is said that there were not less than a hundred. 1295 As
for the Soviet work already quoted, it did not hesitate to put forward the
following figures: more than 500 dead and 900 wounded among the Jews.1296
One should also mention, by way of illustration, the hot reactions of the
foreign press. In the Berliner Tageblatt, even before the 21st of October, one
could read: Thousands and thousands of Jews are massacred in the south of
Russia; more than a thousand Jewish girls and children were raped and
strangled.1297
On the other hand, it is without exaggeration that Kuzmininski summarises
the events: By its magnitude and its violence, this pogrom surpassed all those
who preceded it.He considers that the main person in charge is the governor
of the city, Neudhart. The latter made an unworthy concession by yielding to
Professor Chtchepkins demands, by withdrawing the police from the city and
handing it over to a student militia that did not yet exist. On the 18th, he did
not take any measure to disperse the revolutionary crowd that had gathered in
the streets, he tolerated that power would go to the ramifications of Jews and

1294SJE, t. 6, p. 122.
1295Odesski pogrom (Le pogrom dOdessa), Poalei Zion, pp. 6364.
1296Dimanstein, in 1905, t. 3, v. 1, p. 172.
1297Choutguine, Annexes, p. 292.
revolutionaries (did he not understand that reprisals in the form of a pogrom
would follow?). His negligence could have been explained if he had handed
power over to the army, but that did not happen during the entire period of the
troubles. This did not, however, prevent him from broadcasting during the
events fairly ambiguous statements and later, during the investigation, to lie to
try to justify himself. Having established the evidence of criminal acts
committed in the exercise of his functions, Senator Kouzminski had Neudhart
brought to justice.
With respect to the military command, the senator had no power to do so.
But he indicates that it was criminal on behalf of Kaulbars to yield on 18
October to the demands of the Municipal Duma and to withdraw the army from
the streets of the city. On the 21st, Kaulbars also uses equivocal arguments in
addressing the police officers gathered at the governors house: Let us call
things by name. It must be acknowledged that in our heart we all approve of this
pogrom. But, in the exercise of our functions, we must not let the persecution
we may feel for the Jews transpire. It is our duty to maintain order and to
prevent pogroms and murders.
The senator concluded his report by stating that the troubles and disorders
of October were provoked by causes of undeniably revolutionary character and
found their culmination in an antiJewish pogrom solely because it was
precisely the representatives of that nationality which had taken a preponderant
part in the revolutionary movement. But could we not add that it is also due to
the longstanding laxity of the authorities over the excesses of which the
revolutionaries were guilty?
But as the conviction that the events of October were the sole cause of
Neudharts actions, his provocations, immediately after the end of the
disorders several commissions were formed in Odessa, including the
University, the Municipal Duma and the Council of the Bar Association; they
were actively engaged in collecting documents proving that the pogrom was
the result of a provocation. But after examining the evidence, the senator
discovered no evidence and the investigation did not reveal any facts
demonstrating the participation of even a single police officer to the
organisation of the patriotic manifestation.
The senators report also highlights other aspects of the year 1905 and the
general era.
On 21 October, as rumours spread throughout the city that bombs were
being made and weapons were being stored in large quantities within the
university compound, the military district commander proposed to have the
buildings inspected by a Committee composed of officers and professors. The
rector told him that such an intrusion would violate the autonomy of the
university. Since the day it was proclaimed in August, the university was run
by a commission composed of twelve professors of extremist orientation.
(Shchepkin, for example, declared at a meeting on October 7th: When the hour
strikes and you knock on our door, we will join you on your Potemkin!), But
this commission itself was made under the control of the student soviet
coalition who dictated its orders to the rector. After the rejection of Kaulbars
request, the inspection was carried out by a commission composed of
professors and three municipal councillors, and, of course, nothing suspicious
was discovered.Facts of the same nature were also be observed in the
Municipal Duma. There, it was the municipal employees who manifested
claims to exercise influence and authority; their committee presented to the
Duma, composed of elected representatives, demands of an essentially political
character; on the 17th, the day of the Manifesto, they concocted a resolution:
At last the Autocracy has fallen into the precipice!as the senator writes, it
is not excluded that at the outset of the troubles there might have been
inclinations to take the whole of power.
(After that, it was the revolutionary wave of December, the comminatory
tone of the Soviet of Workers Deputieswe demand the general strikethe
interruption of electric lighting in Odessa, the paralysis of commerce, transport,
the activity of the port, bombs were flying again, the destruction in sets of the
new patrioticoriented newspaper Rousskaa retch1298, the collection [under
threat] of money to finance the revolution, the cohorts of disaffected high
school students and the population frightened under the yoke of the
revolutionary movement.)

This spirit of 1905 (the spirit of the whole liberation movement), which had
manifested itself so violently in Odessa, also broke out in these constitutional
days1299 in many other cities of Russia; both in and outside the Pale of
Settlement, the pogroms broke out everywhere on the very day when was
received the news of the Proclamation from the Manifesto.
Within the Pale of Settlement, pogroms were held in Kremenchug,
Chemigov, Vinnitsa, Kishinev, Balta, Ekaterinoslav, Elizabethgrad, Oman, and
many other towns and villages; the property of the Jews was most often
destroyed but not looted. Where the police and the army took energetic
measures, the pogroms remained very limited and lasted only a short time. Thus
at KamenetsPodolsk, thanks to the effective and rapid action of the police and
the army, all attempts to provoke a pogrom were stifled in the bud. In
Chersonese and Nikolayev, the pogrom was stopped from the beginning. 1300
(And, in a southwestern town, the pogrom did not take place for the good
reason that adult Jews administered a punishment to the young people who had
organised an antigovernment demonstration after the proclamation of the
Imperial Manifesto of 17 October.1301)

1298The Russian Word

1299Because of the proclamation of the Manifesto modifying the Russian regime.
1300Report of Senator Kouzminski, pp. 176178.
1301Report of Senator Tourau, p. 262.
 Where, in the Pale of Settlement, there was no single pogrom, it was in the
northwest region where the Jews were most numerous, and it might have
seemed incomprehensible if the pogroms had been organised by the authorities
and generally proceeded according to the same scenario.1302
Twentyfour pogroms took place outside the Pale of Settlement, but they
were directed against all the progressive elements of society, 1303 and not
exclusively against the Jewsthis circumstance puts in evidence what pushed
people to organise pogroms: the shock effect provoked by the Manifesto and a
spontaneous impulse to defend the throne against those who wanted to put
down the tsar. Pogroms of this type broke out in RostovontheDon, Tula,
Kursk, Kaluga, Voronezh, Riazan, Yaroslav, Viazma, Simferopol, the Tatars
participated actively in the pogroms at Kazan and Feodossia. 1304 In Tver, the
building of the Council of the Zemstvo was sacked; at Tomsk the crowd set fire
to the theatre where a meeting of the Left took place; two hundred persons
perished in the disaster! In Saratov, there were disturbances, but no casualties
(the local governor was none other than Stolypin1305).
On the nature of all these pogroms and the number of their victims, the
opinions diverge strongly according to the authors. The estimates that are made
today are sometimes very fanciful. For example, in a 1987 publication: in the
course of the pogroms we count a thousand killed and tens of thousands of
wounded and maimedand, as echoed by the press at the time: Thousands of
women were raped, very often under the eyes of their mothers and children.1306
Conversely, G. Sliosberg, a contemporary of the events and with all the
information, wrote: Fortunately, these hundreds of pogroms did not bring about
significant violence on the person of the Jews, and in the overwhelming
majority of cases the pogroms were not accompanied by murders. 1307 As for the
women and the elderly, the rebuttal comes from the Bolshevik fighter
Dimanstein, who declared with pride: Jews who were killed or wounded were
for the most part some of the best elements of selfdefence, they were young
and combative and preferred to die rather than surrender.1308
As for the origins of the pogroms, the Jewish community and then the
Russian public opinion in 1881 were under the tenacious hold of a hypnosis:
undoubtedly and undeniably, the pogroms were manipulated by the government!
Petersburg guided by the Police Department! After the events of 1905, the
whole press also presented things as such. And Sliosberg himself, in the midst
of this hypnosis, abounds in this sense: For three days, the wave of pogroms
has swept over the Pale of Settlement [we have just seen that this area was not

1302SJE, t. 6, p. 566.
1303Ibidem.
1304JE, t. 12, pp. 620622.
1305I. L. Teitel, Iz moiii jizni za 40 let (Memories of 40 years of my life), Paris, 1925, pp. 184
186.
1306Praisman, in 22, 1986/87, no. 51, p. 183.
1307Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 180.
1308Dimanstein, t. 3, p.172.
touched in full and that, conversely, other regions of Russia wereA. S.], and
according to a perfectly identical scenario, were planned in advance.1309
And this strange absence, in so many, many authors, if only one would
attempt to explain things differently! (Many years later, I. Frumkin
acknowledged at least: the pogroms of 1905 were not only antiJewish, but
also counterrevolutionary.1310 And no one even asks the question: and if the
root causes were the same and should be sought in political events, the state of
mind of the population? Are not the same concerns expressed in this way? Let
us recall that the crowd had here and there demonstrated against the strikers
before the proclamation of the Manifesto. Let us also recall that a general strike
of the railways took place in October and that the communications had been
interrupted throughout the countryand, in spite of this, so many pogroms
broke out at the same time? It should also be noted that the authorities ordered
investigations in a whole series of towns and that sanctions were imposed on
police officers convicted of breaches of duty. Let us recall that during the same
period the peasants organised pogroms against the landowners all over the
place, and that they all proceeded in the same way. Without doubt, we are not
going to say that these pogroms were also contrived by the Police Department
and that they did not reflect the same uneasiness among all the peasants.
It seems that one proofonly oneof the existence of a scheme exists, but
it does not point in the direction of power either. The Minister of the Interior R.
N. Dournovo discovered in 1906 that an official in charge of special missions,
M. S. Komissarov, had used the premises of the Police Department to secretly
print leaflets calling for the fight against Jews and revolutionaries. 1311 It should
be emphasised, however, that this was not an initiative of the Department, but a
conspiracy by an adventurer, a former gendarmerie officer, who was
subsequently entrusted with special missions by the Bolsheviks, to the Cheka,
to the GPU, and was sent to the Balkans to infiltrate what remained of the
Wrangel army1312.
The falsified versions of events have nonetheless solidly embedded
themselves in consciences, especially in the distant regions of the West, where
Russia has always been perceived through a thick fog, while antiRussian
propaganda was heard distinctly. Lenin had every interest in inventing the fable
according to which tsarism endeavoured to direct against the Jews the hatred
which the workers and peasants, overwhelmed by misery, devoted to the nobles
and capitalists; and his henchman, LourieLarine, tried to explain this by class
struggle: only the rich Jews would have been targetedwhereas the facts prove
the contrary: it was precisely they who enjoyed the protection of the police. 1313
But, even today, it is everywhere the same version of the factslet us take the
1309Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 177.
1310Frumkin, BJWR-1, p. 71.
1311Retch, 1906, 5 May.
1312One of the main components of the White Army.
1313I. Larme, Ievrei i antisemitizm v SSSR (The Jews and AntiSemitism in the USSR), M.L.
1929, pp. 36, 292.
example of the Encyclopdia Judaica: From the beginning, these pogroms
were inspired by government circles. The local authorities received instruction
to give freedom of action to the thugs and to protect them against Jewish
detachments of selfdefence.1314 Let us take again the Jewish Encyclopdia
published in Israel in the Russian language: By organising the pogroms, the
Russian authorities sought to; the government wanted to physically
eliminate as many Jews as possible1315 [emphasis in italics added everywhere
by meA. S.]. All these events, therefore, would not have been the effect of the
criminal laxity of the local authorities, but the fruit of a machination carefully
guarded by the central government?
However, Leo Tolstoy himself, who at the time was particularly upset with
the government and did not miss an opportunity to speak ill of it, said at the
time: I do not believe that the police push the people [to the pogroms]. This
has been said for Kishinev as well as for Baku It is the brutal manifestation of
the popular will The people see the violence of the revolutionary youth and
resist it.1316
At the tribune of the Duma, Chulguine proposed an explanation similar to
that of Tolstoy: The posse justice is very widespread in Russia as in other
countries What happens in America is rich in lessons regarding this: posse
justice is called lynching But what has recently happened in Russia is even
more terribleit is the form of posse justice called pogrom! When the power
went on strike, when the most inadmissible attacks on the national sentiment
and the most sacred values for the people remained completely unpunished,
then, under the influence of an unreasoned anger, it began to do justice to itself.
It goes without saying that in such circumstances the people are incapable of
differentiating between the guilty and the innocent and, in any case, what has
happened to usit has rejected all the fault on the Jews. Of these, few guilty
have suffered, for they have been clever enough to escape abroad; it is the
innocent who have massively paid for them.1317 (Cadet leader F. Rodichev, for
his part, had the following formula: AntiSemitism is the patriotism of
disoriented peoplelet us say: where there are Jews.)
The tsar had been too weak to defend his power by the law, and the
government proved its pusillanimity; then the petty bourgeois, the petty traders
and even the workers, those of the railways, the factories, the very people who
had organised the general strike, revolted, stood up in a spontaneous way to
defend their most sacred values, wounded by the contortions of those who
denigrated them. Uncontrollable, abandoned, desperate, this mass gave free rein
to its rage in the barbaric violence of the pogroms.
And in the case of a contemporary Jewish writer who is also lacking in
sagacity when he persists in asserting that undoubtedly, tsarist power played a
1314Encyclopdia Judaica, vol. 13, p. 698.
1315SJE, t. 6, p. 568.
1316D. P. Makovitsky, 19051906 v Iasnoi Poliane (19051906 in Yasnaya Poliana), Golos
minovehevo. M., 1923, no. 3, p. 26.
1317Second Duma, shorthand for the debates, 12 March 1907, p. 376.
major role in the organisation of antiJewish pogroms, we find in a nearby
paragraph: We are absolutely convinced that the Police Department was not
sufficiently organised to implement simultaneous pogroms in six hundred and
sixty different places that same week. The responsibility for these pogroms is
not solely and not so much for the administration, but rather for the Russian and
Ukrainian population in the Pale of Settlement.1318
On the latter point, I agree as well. But subject to a reservation, and it is of
size: the Jewish youth of this time also carries a heavy share of responsibility in
what happened. Here manifested itself a tragic characteristic of the Russian
Ukrainian character (without attempting to distinguish which of the Russians or
Ukrainians participated in the pogroms): under the influence of anger, we yield
blindly to the need to blow off some steam without distinguishing between
good and bad; after which, we are not able to take the timepatiently,
methodically, for years, if necessaryto repair the damage. The spiritual
weakness of our two peoples is revealed in this sudden outburst of vindictive
brutality after a long somnolence.
We find the same impotence on the side of the patriots, who hesitate
between indifference and semiapproval, unable to make their voice heard
clearly and firmly, to guide opinion, to rely on cultural organisations. (Let us
note in passing that at the famous meeting at Wittes, there were also
representatives of the press of the right, but they did not say a word, they even
acquiesced sometimes to Proppers impertinences.)
Another secular sin of the Russian Empire tragically had its effects felt
during this period: the Orthodox Church had long since been crushed by the
State, deprived of all influence over society, and had no ascendancy over the
popular masses (an authority which it had disposed of in ancient Russia and
during the time of the Troubles, and which would soon be lacking very much
during the civil war!). The highest hierarchs were able to exhort the good
Christian people, for months and years, and yet they could not even prevent the
crowd from sporting crucifixes and icons at the head of the pogroms.
It was also said that the pogroms of October 1905 had been organised by
The Union of the Russian People. This is not true: it did not appear until
November 1905, in instinctive reaction to the humiliation felt by the people. Its
programme at the time had indeed global antiJewish orientations: The
destructive, antigovernmental action of the Jewish masses, solidarity in their
hatred for everything Russian and indifferent to the means to be used.1319
In December, its militants called on the Semienovski regiment to crush the
armed insurrection in Moscow. Yet the Union of the Russian People, which was
ultimately made legendary by rumours and fears, was in reality only a shabby
little party lacking in means whose only raison dtre was to lend its support to
the autocratic monarch, which, early as the spring of 1906, had become a
constitutional monarch. As for the government, it felt embarrassed to have

1318Praisman, in 22, 198687, no. 51, pp. 183, 186187.

1319Novoie vremia, 1905, 20 Nov. (3 Dec), pp. 23.
support for such a party. So that the latter, strong of its two or three thousand
local soviets composed of illiterates and incompetents, found itself in
opposition to the government of the constitutional monarchy, and especially to
Stolypin.From the tribune of the Duma, Purishkevich 1320 interrogated in these
terms the deputies, since the appearance of the monarchist organisations, have
you seen many pogroms in the Pale of Settlement? Not one, because the
monarchists organisations struggled and struggled against Jewish predominance
by economic measures, cultural measures, and not by punches. 1321These
measures were they so cultural, one might ask, but no pogrom is actually known
to have been caused by the Union of the Russian People, and those which
preceded were indeed the result of a spontaneous popular explosion.
A few years later, the Union of the Russian Peoplewhich, from the start,
was merely a masqueradedisappeared in the mist of general indifference.
(One can judge of the vagueness that surrounded this party by the astonishing
characteristic that is given in the Jewish Encyclopdia: the antiSemitism of the
Union of the Russian People is very characteristic of nobility and great
capital!1322)
There is another mark of infamy, all the more indelible as its outlines are
vague: the Black Hundreds.
Where does that name come from? Difficult to say: according to some, this
is how the Poles would have designated out of spite the Russian monks who
resisted victoriously the assault of the Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius in 1608
1609. Through obscure historical channels, it reached the twentieth century and
was then used as a very convenient label to stigmatise the popular patriotic
movement that had spontaneously formed. It was precisely its character, both
imprecise and insulting, that made it a success. (Thus, for example, the four
KDs who became emboldened to the point of entering into negotiations with
Stolypin were denounced as KDBlackHundreds. In 1909, the Milestones
Collection was accused of propagating in a masked form the ideology of the
Black Hundreds.) And the expression became commonplace for a century,
although the Slavic populations, totally dismayed and discouraged, were never
counted by hundreds but by millions.
In 19081912, the Jewish Encyclopdia published in Russia, in its honour,
did not interfere in giving a definition of the Black Hundreds: the Jewish
intellectual elite of Russia had in its ranks sufficient minds that were balanced,
penetrating, and sensible. But during the same period before the First World
War, the BrockhausEfron Encyclopdia proposed a definition in one of its
supplements: The Black Hundreds has been for a few years the common
name given to the dregs of society focused on pogroms against Jews and
intellectuals. Further, the article broadens the statement: This phenomenon is
not specifically Russian; it appeared on the stage of history in different

1320V. Purishkevich (18701920), one of the leaders of the Russian extreme right.
1321Stenographic Record of the Third Duma, 1911, p. 3118.
1322JE, t. 14, p. 519.
countries and at different times.1323 And it is true that, in the press after the
February revolution, I found the expression the Swedish Black Hundreds!
A wise contemporary Jewish author rightly points out that the
phenomenon which has been designated by the term Black Hundreds has not
been sufficiently studied.1324
But this kind of scruple is totally foreign to the famous Encyclopdia
Britannica whose authority extends to the entire planet: The Black Hundreds
or Union of the Russian People or organisation of reactionary and antiSemitic
groups in Russia, constituted during the revolution of 1905. Unofficially
encouraged by authorities, the Black Hundreds recruited their troops for the
most part from the landowners, the rich peasants, the bureaucrats, the police,
and the clergy; they supported the Orthodox Church, autocracy and Russian
nationalism. Particularly active between 1906 and 19111325
One remains stunned before so much science! And this is what is being
read to all cultivated humanity: recruited their troops for the most part from the
landowners, the rich peasants, the bureaucrats, the police, and the clergy! It
was thus those people who smashed the windows of the Jewish shops with their
sticks! And they were particularly active after 1905 when the calm had
returned!
True, in 19051907 there were actions against landowners, there were even
more pogroms against the Jews. It was always the same ignorant and brutal
crowd that ransacked and looted houses and property, massacring people
(including children), and even cattle; but these massacres never led to
condemnation on the part of the progressive intelligentsia, while the deputy in
the Duma Herzenstein, in a speech in which he took with passion and reason the
defence of small peasant farms, alerting parliamentarians of the danger of an
extension of the fires of rural estates, exclaimed: The illuminations of the
month of May last year are not enough for you, when in the region of Saratov
one hundred and fifty properties were destroyed practically in a single day? 1326
These illuminations were never forgiven. It was, of course, a blunder on his
part, from which it should not be inferred that he was glad of such a situation.
Would he have used this word, however, about the pogroms against the Jews of
the preceding autumn?
It was not until the Great, the real revolution, that the violence against the
noble landlords was heard, they were no less barbaric and unacceptable than
the pogroms against the Jews There is, however, in the leftwing circles a
tendency to consider as positive the destruction of the old political and social
system.1327
Yes, there was another frightening similarity between these two forms of
pogroms: the sanguinary crowd had the feeling of being in its right.
1323Entsiklopcditcheskii slovar, Spb., Brockhaus i Efron. Dopoln, t. 2 (4 / d), 1907, p. 869.
1324Boris Orlov, Rossia bez evrcev (Russia without the Jews), 22, 1988, no. 60, p. 151.
1325Encyclopdia Britannica. 15th ed., 1981, vol. II, p. 62, cl. 2.
1326Proceedings of the First Duma, May 19th 1906, p. 524.
1327I. O. Levine, Evrei v revolutsii (The Jews in the Revolution), RaJ, p. 135.
The last pogroms against the Jews took place in 1906 in Sedlets, in Poland
which is beyond our scopeand in Bialystok during the summer. (Soon after,
the police stifled a pogrom in preparation in Odessa after the dissolution of the
first Duma.)
In Bialystok was constituted the most powerful of the anarchist groups in
Russia. Here, important bands of anarchists had made their appearance; they
perpetrated terrorist acts against owners, police officers, Cossacks, military
personnel.1328 The memories left by some of them make it possible to represent
the atmosphere of the city very clearly in 19051906: repeated attacks by the
anarchists who had settled in the Street de Souraje, where the police did not
dare go any more. It was very common for policemen on duty to be
assassinated in broad daylight; This is why we saw fewer and fewer of them
Here is the anarchist Nissel Farber: he threw a bomb at the police station,
wounding two peacekeepers, a secretary, killing two bourgeois who were there
by chance, and, lack of luck, perished himself in the explosion. Here is
Guelinker (a.k.a. Aron Eline): he also launched a bomb, which seriously
wounded the deputy of the chief of police, a commissioner, two inspectors and
three agents. Here is another anarchist whose bomb wounds an officer and
three soldiers, hurts him as well, in fact, and, unfortunately, kills a militant of
the Bund. Here again it is a commissioner and a peacekeeper who are killed,
there are two gendarmes, and again the same Guelinker kills a concierge.
(Apart from the attacks, the expropriation of consumer products was also
practisedfood had to be eaten.) The authorities lived in fear of an uprising
of the anarchists in the Street de Souraje, the police had taken the habit of
expecting such an uprising for today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
The majority of the anarchists were leaning towards a resolute armed
action in order to maintain, as much as possible, an atmosphere of class war.
To this end, terror was also extended to the Jewish bourgeois. The same
Farber attacked the head of a workshop, a certain Kagan, at the exit of the
synagogue he wounded him seriously with a knife in the neck; another little
patron, Lifchitz, suffered the same fate; also the wealthy Weinreich was
attacked in the synagogue, but the revolver was of poor quality and jammed
three times. There was a demand for a series of significant gratuitous actions
against the bourgeois: the bourgeois must feel himself in danger of death at
every moment of his existence. There was even the idea of disposing all along
[the main street of Bialystok] infernal machines to blow up the entire upper
class at once. But how to transmit the anarchist message? Two currents
emerged in Bialystok: the gratuitous terrorists and the communards who
considered terrorism to be a dull and mediocre method, but tended towards
the armed insurrection in the name of communism without State: To invest
in the city, to arm the masses, to resist several attacks by the army and then to
drive them out of the city, and, at the same time, to invest in plants, factories
1328Dimanstein, t. 3, p. 163.
and shops. It was in these terms that, during meetings of fifteen to twenty
thousand people, our speakers called for an armed uprising. Alas, the working
masses of Bialystok having withdrawn from the revolutionary vanguard that
they themselves had suckled from, it was imperative to overcome the
passivity of the masses. The anarchists of Bialystok thus prepared an
insurrection in 1906. Its course and its consequences are known as the pogrom
of Bialystok.1329
It all began with the assassination of the chief of police, which took place
precisely in this Street de Souraje where the Jewish anarchist organisation was
concentrated; then someone shot or threw a bomb on a religious procession.
After that, a commission of inquiry was dispatched by the State Duma, but alas,
alas, three times alas, it failed to determine whether it was a shot or some sort
of whistling: witnesses were unable to say.1330 This, the communist Dimanstein
wrote very clearly, twenty years later, that a firecracker was thrown at an
Orthodox procession as a provocation.1331
Nor can one exclude the participation of the Bund who, during the best
months of the 1905 revolution, had burned with a desire to move to armed
action, but in vain, and was withering away to the point of having to consider
renewing allegiance to the Social democrats. But it is of course the anarchists of
Bialystok themselves who manifested themselves with the most brilliance.
Their leader, Judas GrossmanRochinin, recounted after 1917 what this nest of
anarchists was: above all, they were afraid of yielding to a waitandsee
approach and to common sense. Having failed in organising two or three
strikes because of the lack of support from the population, they decided in June
1906 to take charge of the city and expropriate the tools of production. We
considered that there was no reason to withdraw from Bialystok without having
given a last class struggle, that it would have come down to capitulating in front
of a complex problem of a superior type; if we do not move to the ultimate
stage of the struggle, the masses will lose confidence [in us]. However, men
and weapons were lacking to take the city, and Grossman ran to Warsaw to seek
help from the armed fraction of the PPS (the Polish Socialists). And there he
heard a newsagent shouting: Bloody pogrom in Bialystok! thousands of
victims! Everything became clear: the reaction had preceded us!1332
And it is there, in the passage to the ultimate stage of the struggle, that is
doubtlessly found the explanation for the pogrom. The revolutionary impetus
of the Bialystok anarchists was expressed subsequently. At the trial, in the
pleadings of the lawyer Gillerson who called for the overthrow of the
government and the political and social system existing in Russia, and which,
for precisely this reason, was himself prosecuted. As for the Duma commission,
it considered that the conditions of a pogrom had also been created by various
1329Iz istorii anarkhitcheskovo dvijenia v Bialystoka (Aspects of the history of the anarchist
movement in Bialystok), Soblazn sotsializma, pp. 417432.
1330JE, t. 5, pp. 171172.
1331Dimanslein, t. 3, p. 180.
1332GrossmanRochtchine, Byloe, 1924, nos. 2728. pp. 180182.
elements of society who imagined that fighting the Jews was tantamount to
fighting the liberation movement.1333
But after that firecracker thrown by the provocation which the Duma
Committee had not been able to detect, what had been the course of events?
According to the commissions findings, the systematic execution of innocent
Jews, including women and children, was carried out under the pretext of
repressing the revolutionaries. There were more than seventy dead and about
eighty wounded among the Jews. Conversely, the indictment tended to
explain the pogrom by the revolutionary activity of the Jews, which had
provoked the anger of the rest of the population. The Duma Committee
rejected this version of the facts: There was no racial, religious, or economic
antagonism in Bialystok between Jews and Christians.1334
And here is what is written today: This time the pogrom was purely
military. The soldiers were transformed into rioters, and chased the
revolutionaries. At the same time, these soldiers were said to be afraid of the
detachments of Jewish anarchists in the Street de Souraje, because the war in
Japan had taught [Russian soldiers] to beware of gunshotssuch were the
words pronounced in the Municipal Duma by a Jewish councillor.1335 Against
the Jewish detachments of selfdefence are given the infantry and the cavalry,
but, on the other side, there are bombs and firearms.
In this period of strong social unrest, the Duma committee concluded to a
strafing of the population, but twenty years later, we can read in a Soviet book
(in any case, the old regime will not come back, will not be able to justify
itself, and so we can go ahead!): They massacred entire families with the use
of nails, they pierced their eyes, cut tongues, smashed the skulls of children,
etc.1336 And a luxury book edited abroad, sensationalist book, denunciatory, a
richly illustrated folio, printed on coated paper, entitled The Last Autocrat
(decreeing in advance that Nicholas II would indeed be the last), proposed the
following version: the pogrom had been the object of such a staging that it
seemed possible to describe the program of the first day in the Berlin
newspapers; thus, two hours before the beginning of the Bialystok pogrom, the
Berliners could be informed of the event. 1337 (But if something appeared in the
Berlin press, was it not merely an echo of GrossmanRochins shenanigans?)
Moreover, it would have been rather absurd on the part of the Russian
government to provoke pogroms against the Jews even as the Russian ministers
were lobbying among Western financiers in the hope of obtaining loans. Let us
remember that Witte had great difficulty in obtaining from the Rothschilds, who
were illdisposed towards Russia because of the situation of the Jews and the
pogroms, as well as other important Jewish establishments, 1338 with the
exception of the Berliner banker Mendelssohn. As early as December 1905, the
1333JE, t. 5, pp. 171174.
1334Ibidem, pp. 170. 172.
1335Praisman, pp. 185186.
1336Dimanstein, t. 3, p. 180.
1337Der Leizte russischc Allcinherrscher, Berlin, Eberhard Frowein Verlag (1913), p. 340.
Russian ambassador to London, Benkendorf, warned his minister: The
Rothschilds are repeating everywhere That Russias credit is now at its lowest
level, but that it will be restored immediately if the Jewish question is
settled.1339
At the beginning of 1906, Witte disseminated a government communiqu
saying that finding a radical solution to the Jewish problem is a matter of
conscience for the Russian people, and this will be done by the Duma, but even
before the Duma unites itself, the most stringent provisions will be repealed
insofar as they are no longer justified in the present situation. 1340 He begged the
most eminent representatives of the Jewish community of Saint Petersburg to go
as a delegation to the tsar, and he promised them the most kind welcome. This
proposal was discussed at the Congress of the Union for the Integrality of
Rightsand after the fiery speech of I. B. Bak (editor of the Retch newspaper)
it was decided to reject it and to send a less important delegation to Witte, not to
provide answers, but to make accusations: to tell him clearly and
unambiguously that the wave of pogroms was organised at the initiative and
with the support of the government.1341
After two years of revolutionary earthquake, the leaders of the Jewish
community in Russia who had taken the upper hand did not for a moment
contemplate accepting a progressive settlement regarding the question of equal
rights. They felt that they were carried by the wave of victory and had no need
to go to the tsar in the position of beggars and loyal subjects. They were proud
of the audacity displayed by the Jewish revolutionary youth. (One must position
oneself in the context of the time when the old imperial army was believed to be
immovable, to perceive the significance of the episode during which, in front of
the regiment of Rostov grenadiers standing at attention, his commander,
Colonel Simanski, had been arrested by a volunteer Jew!) After all, perhaps
these revolutionaries had not been guilty of national treason, as Doubnov had
accused them, perhaps they were the ones who were in the truth?After 1905,
only the fortunate and prudent Jews were left to doubt it.
What was the record of the year 1905 for the entire Jewish community in
Russia? On the one hand, the revolution of 1905 had overall positive results
it brought to the Jews political equality even when they did not even enjoy civil
equality Never as after the Liberation Movement did the Jewish question
benefit from a more favourable climate in public opinion. 1342 But, on the other
hand, the strong participation of the Jews in the revolution contributed to the

1338A. Popov, Zaem 1906 g. V Donesseniakh ruskovo posla v Parije (The loan of 1906 through
the despatches of the Russian ambassador to Paris), Krasnyy arkhiv, 1925, t. 11/12, p. 432.
1339K peregovoram Kokovtseva o zame v 19051906 gg. (The Kokovtsev Talks for
Borrowing), Krasnyy arkhiv, 1925, t. 10, p. 7.
1340Perepiska N.A. Romanova i P.A. Solypina (Correspondence between N. A. Romanov and
P. A. Stolypin). Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1924, t. 5, p. 106.
1341Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 185188.
1342G. A. Landau, Revolutsionnye idei v ievreskoi obchtchcstvennosti (Revolutionary ideas in
Jewish opinion). RaJ, p. 116.
fact that they were henceforth all identified with it. At the tribune of the Duma
in 1907 V. Choulgin proposed to vote a resolution to find that the western
half of Russia, from Bessarabia to Warsaw, is full of hatred towards the Jews
whom they consider the responsible for all their misfortunes1343
This is indirectly confirmed by the increase in Jewish emigration from
Russia. If, in 19041905, there was still an increase in emigration among
mature men, the whole age pyramid is concerned from 1906 onwards. The
phenomenon is therefore not due to the pogroms of 18811882, but indeed
those of 19051906. From now on, for the United States alone, the number of
immigrants rose to 125,000 people in 19051906 and to 115,000 in 1906
1907.1344
But at the same time, writes B. I. Goldman, in the short years of agitation,
higher education institutions did not rigorously apply the numerus clausus to the
Jews, a relatively large number of Jewish professional executives, and as they
were more skilful than the Russians in placing themselves on the market,
without always being distinguished by a great moral rigour in their activity,
some began to speak of a hold of the Jews on the intellectual professions. 1345
And in the Project for Universities prepared in 1906 by the Ministry of Public
Instruction, no mention was made to the numerus clausus. In 1905 there were
2,247 (9.2%) Jewish students in Russia; in 1906, 3,702 (11.6%); In 1907, 4,266
(12%).1346
In the program of reforms announced on August 25th, 1906 by the
Government, the latter undertook to reexamine, among the limitations to which
the Jews were subjected, those which could be immediately lifted insofar as
they merely provoke dissatisfaction and are obviously obsolete.
However, at the same time, the Russian government could no longer be
affected by the revolution (which was prolonged for another two years by a
wave of terrorism hardly contained by Stolypin) and by the very visible
participation of the Jews in this revolution.
To these subjects of discontent was added the humiliating defeat against
Japan, and the ruling circles of Saint Petersburg yielded to the temptation of a
simplistic explanation: Russia is fundamentally sound, and the whole
revolution, from beginning to end, is a dark plot hatched by the Jews, an
episode of the JudeoMasonic plot. Explain everything by one and the same
cause: the Jews! Russia would long have been at the zenith of glory and
universal power if there were no Jews!
And, clinging to this short but convenient explanation, the high spheres
only brought the hour of their fall even closer.

1343Stenographic Record of Debates at the Second Duma, 6 March 1907, p. 151.

1344JE, t. 2, pp. 235236; SJE, t. 6, p. 568.
1345B. I. Goldman (B. Gorev), Icvrci v proizvedcniakh rousskikh pissatelei (The Jews in
Russian Literature), Pd. Svobodnoe slovo, 1917, p. 28.
1346SJE, t. 7, p. 348.
 The superstitious belief in the historical force of conspiracies (even if they
exist, individual or collective) leaves completely aside the main cause of
failures suffered by individuals as well as by states: human weaknesses.
It is our Russian weaknesses that have determined the course of our sad
historythe absurdity of the religious schism caused by Nikon 1347, the senseless
violence of Peter the Great and the incredible series of countershocks that
ensued, wasting our strength for causes that are not ours, the inveterate
sufficiency of the nobility and bureaucratic petrification throughout the
nineteenth century. It is not by the effect of a plot hatched from the outside that
we have abandoned our peasants to their misery. It was not a plot that led the
great and cruel Petersburg to stifle the sweet Ukrainian culture. It was not
because of a conspiracy that four ministries were unable to agree on the
assignment of a particular case to one or the other of them, they spent years in
exhausting squabbles mobilising all levels of the hierarchy. It is not the result of
a plot if our emperors, one after the other, have proved incapable of
understanding the evolution of the world and defining the true priorities. If we
had preserved the purity and strength, which were formerly infused into us by
Saint Sergius of Radonezh, we should not fear any plot in the world.
No, it can not be said in any case that it was the Jews who organised the
revolutions of 1905 or 1917, just as one cannot say that it was this nation as a
whole that fomented them. In the same way, it was not the Russians or the
Ukrainians, taken together as nations, who organised the pogroms.
It would be easy for us all to take a retrospective look at this revolution and
condemn our renegades. Some were nonJewish Jews,1348 others were
internationalists, not Russians. But every nation must answer for its members
in that it has helped to train them.
On the side of the Jewish revolutionary youth (but also of those who had
formed it) as well as those of the Jews who constituted an important
revolutionary force,1349 it seems that the wise advice Jeremiah addressed to the
Jews deported to Babylon was forgotten: Seek peace for the city where I have
deported you; pray to Yahweh in its favour, for its peace depends on yours.
(Jeremiah 297.)
While the Jews of Russia, who rallied the revolution, only dreamed of
bringing down this same city without thinking of the consequences.

In the long and chaotic human history, the role played by the Jewish people
few but energeticis undeniable and considerable. This also applies to the
history of Russia. But for all of us, this role remains a historical enigma.

1347Patriarch of the Russian Church, who in the seventeenth century wished to impose by force
a reform of liturgical texts and ritual, which gave rise to the schism of the old believers.
1348See, for example, Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, Harper Collins, 1987, p. 448.
1349SJE, t. 7, p. 349.
For the Jews as well.
This strange mission brought them everything but happiness.
 Chapter 10. The Period of the Duma

The Manifesto of 17 October marked the beginning of a qualitatively new

period in Russian history, which was later consolidated by a year of Stolypins
government: the period of the Duma or of limited Autocracy, during which the
previous principles of governmentthe absolute power of the tsar, the opacity
of the ministries, the immutability of the hierarchywere rapidly and sensibly
restricted. This period was very difficult for all the higher spheres, and only
men with a solid character and an active temperament could enrol with dignity
in the new era. But public opinion also found it difficult to get accustomed to
the new electoral practices, to the publicity of the debates in the Duma (and
even more to the responsibility of the latter); and, in its left wing, the enraged
Leninists as well as the enraged of the Bund simply boycotted the elections to
the first Duma: we have nothing to do with your parliaments, we will achieve
our ends by bombs, blood, convulsions! And so the attitude of the Bund
towards the Jewish deputies of the Duma was violently hostile.1350
But the Jews of Russia, led by the Union for the integrality of rights, were
not mistaken and, expressing their sympathy for the new institution,
participated very actively in the elections, voting most often for the
representatives of the [Cadet] party who had placed the equality of rights for the
Jews on its agenda. Some revolutionaries who had regained their spirits shared
the same dispositions. Thus Isaac Gurvitch, who had emigrated in 1889an
active supporter of the Marxist left, was the cofounder of the American Social
Democratic Party, returned to Russia in 1905, where he was elected to the
Duma Electoral College.1351There were no limitations on the Jews in the
elections, and twelve of them sat in the first Duma; it was true that most of them
came from the Pale of Settlement, while the Jewish leaders of the capital, who
did not have the property qualifications, could not be elected: only Winaver, L.
Bramson1352, and the converted Jew M. Herzenstein (to whom Prince P.
Dolgorukov had given his place).
As the number of Jews in the Duma was significant, the Zionist deputies
proposed forming an independent Jewish group abiding by the discipline of
a real political party, but the nonZionist deputies rejected this idea, contenting
itself to meet from time to time to discuss matters of direct concern to Jewish
1350JE, t. 5, p. 100.
1351RJE, t. 1, p. 392.
1352JE, t. 7, p. 370.
interests,1353 agreeing however, to comply already to a genuine discipline in
the sense of strictly abiding by the decisions of a college composed of members
of the Duma and those of the Committee for the integrality of rights 1354 (the
Political Bureau).
At the same time a solid alliance was formed between the Jews and the
Cadet party. It was not uncommon for the local chapters of the Union [for the
integrality of rights] and the constitutionaldemocratic party to be composed of
the same people.1355 (Some teased Winaver by calling him the Mosaic
Cadet.) In the Pale of Settlement, the overwhelming majority of the [Cadet]
party members were Jews; in the interior provinces, they represented in number
the second nationality As Witte wrote, almost all Jews who graduated from
higher education joined the party of Peoples Freedom [that is, The Cadets]
which promised them immediate access to equal rights. This party owes much
of its influence on the Jews who provided it with both intellectual and material
support.1356 The Jews introduced coherence and rigour into the Russian
Liberation Movement of 1905.1357
However, A. Tyrkova, an important figure in the Cadet party, notes in his
memoirs that the chief founders and leaders of the Cadet party were not Jews.
There were not, among the latter, any personality sufficiently prominent to drive
the Russian liberals behind it, as the Jew Disraeli had done for the English
Conservatives in the middle of the nineteenth century The people that
mattered most within the Cadet party were Russians. This does not mean that I
deny the influence of these Jews who have joined our masses. They could not
fail to act upon us, if only by their inexhaustible energy. Their very presence,
their activity, did not allow us to forget them, to forget their situation, to forget
that they had to be helped. And, further on: Reflecting on all these networks
of influence of the Jews [within the Cadet party], one cannot overlook the case
of Miliukov. From the beginning, he became their favourite, surrounded by a
circle of admirers, more precisely feminine admirers who cradled him in
muted melodies, cajoled him, covered him without restraint of praise so
excessive that they were comical.1358
V. A. Obolensky, also a member of the party, describes a Cadet club during
the time of the First Duma at the corner of Sergevskaya and Potmekinskaya
streets. The elite of the secularised Jewish society and the elite of the Russian
politicised intelligentsia were mingled: There were always a lot of people, and
the public, composed mostly of wealthy Jewish Petersburgers, was very elegant:
the ladies wore silk robes, shiny brooches and rings, the gentlemen had the airs

1353JE, t. 7, p. 371.
1354G. B. Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 200.
1355SJE, p. 349
1356Ibidem, pp. 398399.
1357V. V. Choulguine, Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa, Ob Antisemitism v Rossii (What we
do not like about them On antiSemitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, p. 207.
1358A. TyrkovaWilliams, Na poutiakh k svobode (The Paths to Freedom), New York, ed.
Chekov, 1952, pp. 303304.
of wellnourished and selfsatisfied bourgeois. Despite our democratic
convictions, we were somewhat shocked by the atmosphere that prevailed in
this Cadet club. One can imagine the embarrassment experienced by the
peasants who came to attend the meetings of our parliamentary group. A party
of gentlemen, that is what they said to each other when they ceased to attend
our meetings.1359
At the local level, cooperation between the Union for the integrality of
rights and the Cadet Party was manifested not only in the presence of as many
Jewish candidates as possible, but also in the fact that the local factions of the
Union [for the integrality of rights] was instructed to support [nonJews] who
promised to contribute to the emancipation of the Jews.1360 As explained in
1907 the cadet newspaper Retch, in reply to questions repeatedly asked by other
newspapers: Retch has, in its time, formulated very precisely the conditions of
the agreement with the Jewish group The latter has the right to challenge the
electoral college and to oppose nominations to the Duma.1361
During the parliamentary debates, the Duma, following the logic of the
Imperial Manifesto, raised the question of equal rights for Jews within the
general framework of granting the same rights to all citizens. The State Duma
has promised to prepare a law on the full equalisation of the rights of all
citizens and the abrogation of any limitations or privileges associated with
membership to a social class, nationality, religion or sex.1362 After adopting the
main guidelines of this law, the Duma lost itself in debates for another month,
multiplying thunderous declarations followed by no effect 1363, to be ultimately
dissolved. And the law on civil equality, especially for the Jews, remained
pending.
Like most Cadets, the Jewish deputies of the First Duma signed Vyborgs
appeal, which meant that it was now impossible for them to stand for elections;
Winavers career particularly suffered from it. (In the First Duma, he had made
violent remarks, although he would later advise the Jews not to put themselves
too much in the spotlight to prevent a recurrence of what had happened in the
revolution of 1905.)
The participation of the Jews in the elections of the second Duma was
even more marked than during the first election campaign The Jewish
populations of the Pale of Settlement showed the strongest interest in this
election. The political debate reached all levels of society. Nevertheless, as the
Jewish Encyclopdia published before the Revolution indicates, there was also
an important antiJewish propaganda carried out by rightwing monarchist

1359V. A. Obolensky, Moa jizn. Moi sovremenniki (My life, My contemporaries), Paris, YMCA
Press. 1988, p. 335.
1360SJE, t. 7, p. 349.
1361Retch (The Word), 1907, 7 (19) January, p. 2.
1362JE, t. 7, p. 371.
1363V. A. Maklakov, 19051906 gody (19051906)M. Winaver i ruskaya obchtchestvennost
nachala XX veka (M. Winaver and the Russian public opinion at the beginning of the
twentieth century), Paris, 1937, p. 94.
circles, particularly active in the western provinces; the peasants were
persuaded that all progressive parties were fighting for the equal rights of the
Jews to the detriment of the interests of the ethnic population 1364; that behind
the masquerade of the popular representation, the country was governed by a
JudeoMasonic union of spoliators of the people and traitors to the fatherland;
that the peasant should be alarmed at the unprecedented number of new
masters unknown to the elders of the village, and whom he henceforth had to
nourish with his labour; that the Constitution promised to replace the Tatar
yoke by that, injurious, of the international Kahal. And a list of the existing
rights to be abrogated was drawn up: not only were Jews not to be elected to the
Duma, but they all had to be relegated to the Pale of Settlement; prohibiting
them from selling wheat, grain and timber, working in banks or commercial
establishments; confiscating their properties; prohibiting them from changing
their names; to serve as publisher or editor of news organisation; to reduce the
Pale of Settlement itself by excluding the fertile regions, to not grant land to the
Jews within the province of Yakutsk; in general, to regard them as foreigners, to
substitute for them military service by a tax, etc. The result of this antiSemitic
propaganda, spread both orally and in writing, was the collapse of progressive
candidates in the second Duma throughout the Pale of Settlement. 1365 There
were only four Jewish deputies in the second Duma (including three Cadets).1366
But even before these elections, the government addressed the issue of
equal rights for Jews. Six months after taking office as Prime Minister in
December 1906, Stolypin had the government adopt a resolution (the socalled
Journal of the Council of Ministers) on the continuation of the lifting of
restrictions imposed on Jews, and this in essential areas, thus orienting itself
towards integral equality. They considered to eliminate: the prohibition of Jews
from residing in rural areas within the Pale of Settlement; the prohibition of
residing in rural areas throughout the Empire for persons enjoying the right of
universal residence; the prohibition of including Jews in the directory of joint
stock companies holding land.1367
But the Emperor replied in a letter dated 10 December: Despite the most
convincing arguments in favour of adopting these measures an inner voice
dictates with increasing insistence not to take this decision upon myself.1368
As if he did not understandor rather forgotthat the resolution proposed
in the Journal was the direct and inescapable consequence of the Manifesto he
had signed himself a year earlier
Even in the most closed bureaucratic world, there are always officials with
eyes and hands. And if the rumour of a decision taken by the Council of
Ministers had already spread to the public opinion? And here we are: we will
1364JE, t. 7, p. 372.
1365JE, t. 2, pp. 749751.
1366JE, t. 7, p. 373.
1367SJE, t. 7, p. 351.
1368Perepiska N. A. Romanova and P. A. Solypina (Correspondence between N. A. Romanov
and P. A. Stolypin), Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1924, vol. 5, p. 105; See also SJE, t. 7, p. 351
know that the ministers want to emancipate the Jews while the sovereign, he,
stood in its way
On the same day, 10 December, Stolypin hastened to write to the Emperor a
letter full of anxiety, repeating all his arguments one by one, and especially:
The dismissal of the Journal is for the moment not known by anyone, it is
therefore still possible to conceal the equivocations of the monarch. Your
Majesty, we have no right to put you in this position and shelter ourselves
behind you. Stolypin would have liked the advantages accorded to the Jews to
appear as a favour granted by the tsar. But since this was not the case, he now
proposed to adopt another resolution: the Emperor made no objections on the
merits, but did not want the law to be promulgated over the head of the Duma;
it must be done by the Duma.
Secretary of State S. E. Kryjanovski said that the emperor then adopted a
resolution which went along in this direction: that the representatives of the
people take responsibility both for raising this issue as well as resolving it. But,
no one knows why, this resolution received little publicity, and on the side of
the Duma, absolutely nothing happened.1369
Widely to the left, penetrated by progressive ideas and so vehement
towards the government, the second Duma was free! Yet, in the second Duma,
there was still less talk of the deprivation of rights suffered by the Jews than in
the first.1370 The law on equal rights for Jews was not even discussed, so, what
can be said about its adoption
Why then did the second Duma not take advantage of the opportunities
offered to it? Why did it not seize them? It had three entire months to do it. And
why did the debates, the clashes, relate only to secondary, tangential issues? The
equality of the Jewsstill partial, but already well advancedwas abandoned.
Why, indeed, why? As for the ExtraParliamentary Extraordinary
Commission, it did not even discuss the plan to repeal the restrictions imposed
on Jews, but circumvented the problem by focusing on integral equality as
quickly as possible.1371
Difficult to explain this other than by a political calculation: the aim being
to fight the Autocracy, the interest was to raise more and more the pressure on
the Jewish question, and to certainly not resolve it: ammunition was thus kept in
reserve. These brave knights of liberty reasoned in these terms: to avoid that the
lifting of restrictions imposed on the Jews would diminish their ardour in battle.
For these knights without fear and without reproach, the most important, was
indeed the fight against the power.
All this was beginning to be seen and understood. Berdyaev, for example,
addressed the whole spectrum of Russian radicalism with the following
reproaches: You are very sensitive to the Jewish question, you are fighting for
their rights. But do you feel the Jew, do you feel the soul of the Jewish

1369S. E. Kryjanorski, Vospominania (Memoirs), Berlin, Petropolis, pp. 9495.

1370SJE, t. 7, p. 351.
1371JE, t. 7, p. 373.
people? No, your fight in favour for the Jews does not want to know the
Jews.1372
Then, in the third Duma, the Cadets no longer had the majority; they did
not take any more initiatives on the Jewish question, fearing that they would be
defeated This caused great discontent among the Jewish masses, and the
Jewish press did not deprive itself of attacking the party of the Peoples
Freedom.1373 Although the Jews had participated in the electoral campaign
with the greatest ardour and the number of Jewish voters exceeded that of the
Christians in all the cities of the Pale of Settlement, they were beaten by the
opposing party, and in the third Duma there were only two Jewish deputies:
Nisselovitch and Friedman.1374 (The latter succeeded to remain up to the fourth
Duma.)Beginning in 1915, the Council of State included among its members
a Jew, G. E. Weinstein, of Odessa. (Just before the revolution, there was also
Solomon Samoylovich Krym, a Karaim.1375)
As for the Octobrists1376 whose party had become a majority in the third
Duma, on the one hand they ceded, not without hesitation, to the pressure of
public opinion which demanded equal rights for the Jews, which led to the
criticism of Russian nationalist deputies: We thought that the Octobrists
remained attached to the defence of national interestsand now, without
warning, they had relegated to the background both the question of the
granting of equal rights to the Russians of Finland (which meant that this
equality did not exist in this Russian colony) and that of the annexation by
Russia of the Kholm region in Poland, with all Russians that inhabit itbut
they have prepared a bill to abolish the Pale of Settlement. 1377 On the other
hand, they were attributed statements of manifestly antiSemitic character:
thus the third Duma, on the initiative of Guchkov, issued in 1906 the wish
that Jewish doctors not be admitted to work in the army health services 1378;
likewise, it was proposed to replace the military service of the Jews by a
tax.1379 (In the years preceding the war, the project of dispensing the Jews from
military service was still largely and seriously debated; and I. V. Hessen
published a book on this subject entitled The War and the Jews.)
In short, neither the second, third, nor fourth Dumas took it upon
themselves to pass the law on the integral equality of rights for the Jews. And
every time it was necessary to ratify the law on equality of rights for peasants
1372Nikolai Berdyaev, Filosofia neravenstva (The Philosophy of Inequality), Paris, YMCA
Press, 1970, p. 72.
1373Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 247.
1374JE, t. 7, pp. 373374.
1375A. A. Goldenweiser, Pravovoe polojenie ievreyev v Rossii (The legal position of Jews in
Russia), [Sb.] Kniga o ruskom evrestve Ot 1860 godov do Revolutsii 1917 g. (Aspects of
the History of Russian Jews), in BJWR1, p. 132; RJE, L 1, p. 212, t. 2, p. 99.
1376Dissenting Cadet Party, founded by Guchkov, demanding the strict application of 30
October Manifesto.
1377Third Duma, Stenographic Record of Debates, 1911, p. 2958.
1378JE, t. 7, p. 375.
1379SJE, t. 7, p. 353.
(promulgated by Stolypin as of 5 October 1906), it was blocked by the same
Dumas, under the pressure of the left, on the grounds that the peasants could not
be granted equal rights before they were granted to the Jews (and the Poles)!
And thus the pressure exerted upon this execrated tsarist government was
not relieved, but doubled, quintupled. And not only did this pressure exerted on
the government not be relieved, not only were these laws not voted upon by the
Duma, but it would last until the February Revolution.
While Stolypin, after his unfortunate attempt in December 1906, quietly
took administrative measures to partially lift the restrictions imposed on the
Jews.
An editorialist from Novoie Vremia, Menshikov, condemned this method:
Under Stolypin, the Pale of Settlement has become a fiction.1380 The Jews are
defeating the Russian power by gradually withdrawing all its capacity to
intervene The government behaves as if it were a Jew.1381
Such is the fate of the middle way.
The general outcry of the parties of the left against a policy of progressive
measures, this tactical refusal for a smooth evolution towards equal rights, was
strongly supported by the Russian press. Since the end of 1905, it was no longer
subject to prior censorship. But it was not only a press that had become free, it
was a press that considered itself a fullfledged actor in the political arena, a
press, as we have seen, that could formulate demands, such as that of
withdrawing the police from the streets of the city! Witte said it had lost its
reason.
In the case of the Duma, the way in which Russia, even in its most remote
provinces, was informed of what was going on there and what was said there,
depended entirely on journalists. The shorthand accounts of the debates
appeared late and with very low circulation, so there was no other source of
information than the daily press, and it was based on what they read that the
people formed an opinion. However, the newspapers systematically distorted
the debates in the Duma, largely opening their columns to the deputies of the
left and showering them with praise, while to the deputies of the right they
allowed only a bare minimum.
A. Tyrkova says that in the second Duma, the accredited journalists
formed their own press office, which depended on the distribution of places
among the correspondents. The members of this office refused to give his card
of accreditation to the correspondent of the Journal the Kolokol (favourite
newspaper of the priests of the countryside). Tyrkova intervened, noting that
these readers should not be deprived of the possibility of being informed about
the debates in the Duma by a newspaper in which they had more confidence
than those of the opposition; but my colleagues, among whom the Jews were

1380Novoie Vremia, 1911, 8 (21) Sept., p. 4.

1381Ibidem, 10 (23) Sept., p. 4.
the most numerous, got carried away, began shouting, explaining that no one
was reading the Kolokol, that that newspaper was of no use.1382
For the Russian nationalist circles, responsibility for this conduct of the
press was simply and solely the responsibility of the Jews. They wanted to
prove that almost all journalists accredited to the Duma were Jews. And they
published whistleblowing lists listing the names of these correspondents.
More revealing is this comical episode of parliamentary life: one day, answering
to the attacks of which he was the object, Purishkevich pointed, in the middle of
his speech, the box of the press, located near the tribune and delimited by a
circular barrier, and said: But see this Pale of Settlement of the Jews!
Everyone turned involuntarily to the representatives of the press, and it was a
general burst of laughter that even the Left could not repress. This Pale of
Settlement of the Duma became an adopted wording.
Among the prominent Jewish publishers, we have already spoken of S. M.
Propper, owner of the Stock Exchange News and unfailing sympathiser of the
revolutionary democracy. Sliosberg evokes more warmly the one who
founded and funded to a large extent the cadet newspaper Retch, I. B. Bak: A
very obliging man, very cultured, with a radically liberal orientation. It was his
passionate intervention at the Congress of the Jewish mutual aid committees at
the beginning of 1906 that prevented a conciliation with the tsar. There was no
Jewish organisation devoted to cultural action or beneficence, of which I. Bak
was not a member; he was particularly distinguished by his work in the Jewish
Committee for Liberation.1383 As for the Retch newspaper and its editorinchief
I. V. Hessen, they were far from limiting themselves to Jewish questions alone,
and their orientation was more generally liberal (Hessen subsequently proved it
in emigration with the Roul and the Archives of the Russian Revolution). The
very serious Russkie Vedomosti published Jewish authors of various tendencies,
both V. Jabotinsky and the future inventor of war communism, LourieLarine. S.
Melgounov noted that the publication in this body of articles favorable to the
Jews was explained not only by the desire to defend the oppressed, but also by
the composition of the newspapers managing team. 1384 There were Jews even
among the collaborators of the Novoie Vremia of Suvorin; the Jewish
Encyclopdia quotes the names of five of them.1385
The newspaper Russkie Vedomosti was long dominated by the figure of G.
B. Iollos, called there by Guerzenstein who had been working there since the
80s. Both were deputies to the First Duma. Their lives suffered cruelly from the
atmosphere of violence engendered by political assassinationsthese being the
very essence of the revolutiona rehearsal of 190506. According to the
Israeli Jewish Encyclopdia, the responsibility for their assassination would

1382TyrkovaWilliams, pp. 340342.

1383Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 186187.
1384S. P. Melgunov, Vospominania i dnevniki. Vyp. I (Memoirs and Journal, 1), Paris, 1964, p.
88.
1385SJE, t. 7, p. 517.
rest with the Union of the Russian People. 1386 For the Russian Jewish
Encyclopdia, if the latter bore responsibility for the assassination of
Guerzenstein (1906), Iollos, him, was killed (1907) by Black Hundreds
Terrorists.1387
Jewish publishers and journalists did not restrict their activities to the
capital or to highly intellectual publications, but they also intervened in the
popular press, such as the Kopeika, a favourite reading of the conciergesa
quarter of a million copies in circulation, it played a major role in the fight
against antiSemitic denigration campaigns. (It had been created and was led
by M. B. Gorodetski.1388) The very influential Kievskaya Mysl (to the left of the
Cadets) had as editorinchief Iona Kugel (they were four brothers, all
journalists), and D. Zaslavski, a wicked rascal, and, what seems to us very
moving, Leo Trotsky! The biggest newspaper of Saratov was edited by
Averbakhsenior (brotherinlaw of Sverdlov). In Odessa appeared for some
time the Novorossiysky Telegraf, with strong rightwing convictions, but
measures of economic suffocation were taken against itsuccessfully.
The Russian press also had migrant stars. Thus L. I. Goldstein, an
inspired journalist who wrote in the most diverse newspapers for thirtyfive
years, including the Syn Otetchestva, and it was also he who founded and
directed the Rossia, a clearly patriotic newspaper. The latter was closed because
of a particularly virulent chronicle directed against the Imperial family: These
Obmanovy gentlemen. The press was to celebrate Goldsteins jubilee in the
spring of 1917.1389As well as the discreet GarveiAltus, who had a moment of
glory for his chronicle The Leap of the Passionate Panther, in which he
poured a torrent of calumnies on the Minister of the Interior, N. A. Maklakov.
(But all this was nothing compared to the unheardof insolence of the
humouristic leaflets of the years 19051907 which covered in muck, in
unimaginable terms, all the spheres of power and of the State. The chameleon
Zinovi Grjebine: in 1905 he published a satirical leaflet, the Joupel; in 1914
1915 he directed the right-minded Otetchestvo, and in 1920 he set up a Russian
publishing house in Berlin in collaboration with the editions of the Soviet
State.1390)
But if the press reflected all sorts of currents of thought, from liberalism to
socialism, and, as far as the Jewish thematic was concerned, from Zionism to
Autonomism, it was a position deemed incompatible with journalistic
respectability: which consisted in adopting a comprehensive attitude towards
power. In the 70s, Dostoyevsky had already noted on several occasions that the
Russian press is out of control. This was even to be seen on the occasion of the
meeting of 8 March 1881, with Alexander III, newly enthroned emperor, and
1386Nationalist mass organisation founded in October 1905 by Dr. Dubrovin and Vladimir
Purishkevich.
1387Ibidem, p. 351; RJE, t. 1, pp. 290, 510.
1388RJE, t. 1, p. 361.
1389Novoie Vremia, 1917, 21 April (4 May); as well as other newspapers.
1390RJE, t. 1, p. 373.
often afterwards: the journalists acted as selfproclaimed representatives of
society.
The following statement was attributed to Napoleon: Three opposition
papers are more dangerous than one hundred thousand enemy soldiers. This
sentence applies largely to the RussoJapanese war. The Russian press was
openly defeatist throughout the conflict and in each of its battles. Even worse, it
did not conceal its sympathies for terrorism and revolution.
This press, totally out of control in 1905, was considered during the period
of the Duma, if we are to believe Witte, as essentially Jewish or semi
Jewish1391; or, to be more precise, as a press dominated by leftwing or radical
Jews who occupied key positions. In November 1905, D. I. Pikhno, editorin
chief for twentyfive years of the Russian newspaper The Kievian and a
connoisseur of the press of his time, wrote: The Jews have bet heavily on the
card of the revolution Those, among the Russians, who think seriously, have
understood that in such moments, the press represents a force and that this force
is not in their hands, but in that of their adversaries; that they speak on their
behalf throughout Russia and have forced people to read them because there is
nothing else to read; and as one cannot launch a publication in one day, [the
opinion] has been drowned beneath this mass of lies, incapable of finding itself
there.1392
L. Tikhomirov did not see the national dimension of this phenomenon, but
he made in 1910 the following remarks about the Russian press: They play on
the nerves They cannot stand contradiction They do not want courtesy, fair
play They have no ideal, they do not know what that is. As for the public
formed by this press, it wants aggressiveness, brutality, it does not respect
knowledge and lets itself be deceived by ignorance.1393
At the other end of the political spectrum, here is the judgement that the
Bolshevik M. Lemke passed on the Russian press: In our day, ideas are not
cheap and information is sensational, selfassured and authoritative ignorance
fills the columns of the newspapers.
More specifically, in the cultural sphere, Andrei Belywho was anything
but a rightwing man or chauvinistwrote these bitter lines in 1909: Our
national culture is dominated by people who are foreign to it See the names
of those who write in Russian newspapers and magazines, literary critics,
musical critics: they are practically nothing but Jews; there are among them
people who have talent and sensibility, and some, few in number, understand
our national culture perhaps better than the Russians themselves; but they are
the exception. The mass of Jewish critics is totally foreign to Russian art, it

1391S. I. Witte, Vopominania. TsarsLvoanie Nikolaa II (Memoirs, The reign of Nicholas II) in 2
vols., Berlin, Slovo, 1922, t. 2, p. 54.
1392The Kievian, 1905, 17 Nov. in Choulguine, Annexes, pp. 285286.
1393Iz dncvnika L. Tikhomirova (Excerpts from the diary of L. Tikhomirov). Krasny Arkhiv,
1936, t. 74, pp. 177179.
expresses itself in a jargon resembling Esperanto, and carries on a reign of terror
among those who try to deepen and enrich the Russian language.1394
At the same time, V. Jabotinsky, a perspicacious Zionist, complained of
progressive newspapers financed by Jewish funds and stuffed with Jewish
collaborators, and warned: When the Jews rushed en masse into Russian
politics, we predicted that nothing good would come of it, neither for Russian
policy nor for the Jews.1395
The Russian press played a decisive role in the assault of the Cadets and the
intelligentsia against the government before the revolution; the deputy in the
Duma A. I. Chingariov expresses well the state of mind that reigned there: This
government only has to sink! To a power like this we cannot even throw the
smallest bit of rope! In this regard, it may be recalled that the First Duma
observed a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the Bialystok pogrom
(refusing to admit, as we have seen, that it was an armed confrontation between
anarchists and the army); the second Duma also paid tribute to Iollos, murdered
by a terrorist; but when Purishkevich offered to observe a minute of silence in
memory of the officers and soldiers who had died in the course of their duty, he
was removed from the sitting and the parliamentarians were so manic that they
thought it unthinkable to pity those who ensured security in the country, that
elementary security which they all needed.
A. Koulicher drew up a fair assessment of this period, but too late, in 1923,
in emigration: Before the revolution there were, among the Jews of Russia,
individuals and groups of individuals, the activity could be characterised
precisely by the lack of sense of responsibility in the face of the confusion that
reigned in the minds of the Jews [through] the propagation of a
revolutionary spirit as vague as it was superficial All their political action
consisted in being more to the left than the others. Confined to the role of
irresponsible critics, never going to the end of things, they considered that their
mission consisted of always saying: It is not enough! These people were
democrats But there was also a particular category of democrats
moreover, they referred to themselves as the Jewish Democratic Groupwho
attached this adjective to any substantive, inventing an unsustainable talmud of
democracy With the only end to demonstrate that the others were not yet
sufficiently democrats They maintained an atmosphere of irresponsibility
around them, of contentless maximalism, of insatiable demand. All of which
had fatal consequences when the revolution came.1396 The destructive influence
of this press is undoubtedly one of the weaknesses, of great vulnerability, of
Russian public life in the years 19141917.

1394Boris Bougayev (Andrei Bely), Chtempelevennaa kultura (The Obliterated Culture),

Viesy, 1909, no. 9, pp. 7577.
1395Vl. Jabotinsky, Dezertiry i khoziaieva (Deserters and Masters), Felietony, Spb, 1913, pp.
7576.
1396A. Koulicher, Ob otvetstvennosti i bezotvetstvennosti (responsibility and irresponsibility).
Ievsreiskaya tribouna, Paris, 1923, no. 7 (160), 6 April, p. 4.
 But what became of the reptilian press, the one that laid down in front of
the authorities, the press of the Russian nationalists? The Russkoye Znamya of
Dubrovinit was said that things fell from your hands so much he was rude
and bad. (Let us note, in passing, that it was forbidden to circulate it in the army
at the request of certain generals.) The Zemshchina was hardly betterI do not
know, I have not read any of these papers. As for the Moskovskiye Vedomosti,
out of breath, they no longer had readers after 1905.
But where were the strong minds and sharp pens of the conservatives, those
who were concerned about the fate of the Russians? Why were there no good
newspapers to counterbalance the devastating whirlwind?
It must be said that, in view of the agile thought and writing of the liberal
and radical press, so accountable for its dynamism to its Jewish collaborators,
the Russian nationalists could only align slow, rather soft, spirits who were not
at all prepared to fight this kind of battle (but what is there to say about this
state of affairs today!). There were only a few literary types exasperated by the
left press, but totally devoid of talent. Moreover, rightwing publications were
facing serious financial difficulties. While the newspapers financed by Jewish
moneyas Jabotinsky used to sayoffered very good wages, hence the
profusion of wordsmiths; and, above all, all these journals without exception
were interesting. Finally, the leftwing press and the Duma demanded the
closure of the subsidised newspapers, that is to say, supported in secret and
rather weakly by the government.
State Secretary S. E. Kryjanovski acknowledged that the government was
providing financial support to more than 30 newspapers in various parts of
Russia, but without success, both because the right lacked educated people,
prepared for journalistic activity, and because the power itself did not know how
to do it either. More gifted than others was I. I. Gourland, a Jew of the Ministry
of the Interior, a unique casewho, under the pseudonym of Vassiliev, wrote
pamphlets sent in sealed envelopes to prominent public figures.
Thus the government had only one organ which merely enumerated the
news in a dry and bureaucratic tone, the Pravitelstvenny Vestnik. But to create
something strong, brilliant, convincing, to openly go to the conquest of public
opinion even in Russialet us not even talk about Europe!that, the imperial
government either did not understand the necessity of it, or was incapable of
doing so, the enterprise being beyond its means or intelligence.
The Novoie Vremia of Suvorin long maintained a progovernmental
orientation; it was a very lively, brilliant and energetic newspaper (but, it must
be said, equally changingsometimes favourable to the alliance with Germany,
sometimes violently hostile to it), and, alas, not always knowing how to make
the difference between national revival and attacks on the Jews. (Its founder, old
Suvorin, sharing his property among his three sons before dying, gave them as a
condition to never yielding any of their shares to Jews.) Witte ranked Novoie
Vremia among the newspapers which, in 1905, had an interest to be of the
left, then turned right to become now ultrareactionaries. This very interesting
and influential journal offers a striking example of this orientation. Although
very commercial, it still counts among the best. 1397 It provided a great deal of
information and was widely disseminatedperhaps the most dynamic of the
Russian newspapers and, certainly, the most intelligent of the organs of the
right.
And the leaders of the right? And the deputies of the right in the Duma?
Most often they acted without taking into account the real relationship
between their strengths and their weaknesses, showing themselves both brutal
and ineffective, seeing no other means of defending the integrity of the Russian
State than calling for more bans on Jews. In 1911, the deputy Balachov
developed a programme that went against the current and the times: reinforcing
the Pale of Settlement, removing Jews from publishing, justice, and the Russian
school. Deputy Zamyslovski protested that within the universities, the Jews, the
S.R.s, the Social Democrats enjoyed a secret sympathyas if one could
overcome by decree a secret sympathyIn 1913 the Congress of the Union of
the nobility demanded (as had already been done in 1908 under the third Duma)
that more Jews be taken into the army, but that they be symmetrically excluded
from public functions, the territorial and municipal administration, and justice.
In the spring of 1911, Purishkevich, striving with others against an already
weakened Stolypin, proposed to the Duma these extreme measures: Formally
forbid the Jews to take any official duty in any administration especially in
the periphery of the Empire The Jews convicted of having tried to occupy
these functions will have to answer before justice.1398
Thus the right reproached Stolypin for making concessions to the Jews.
When he had taken office in the spring of 1906, Stolypin had had to
consider the Manifesto of 17 October as a fait accompli, even if it had to be
slightly amended. That the Emperor had hastily signed it without sufficient
reflectionit no longer mattered, it had to be applied, the State had to be rebuilt
in the midst of difficulties, in accordance with the Manifesto and in spite of the
hesitations of the tsar himself. And this implied equal rights for the Jews.
Of course, the restrictions imposed on the Jews continued, not only in
Russia. In Poland, which was consideredas well as Finlandto be oppressed,
these limitations were even more brutal. Jabotinsky writes: The yoke that
weighs heavily on Jews in Finland is beyond measure even with what is known
of Russia or Romania The first Finnish man, if he surprises a Jew out of a
city, has the right to arrest the criminal and take him to the police station. Most
trades are forbidden to Jews. Jewish marriages are subject to compulsory and
humiliating formalities It is very difficult to obtain permission to build a
synagogue The Jews are deprived of all political rights. Elsewhere in
Austrian Galicia, the Poles do not hide that they see in the Jews only a material
used to strengthen their political power in this region There have been cases
where high school students were excluded from their establishment for cause

1397Witte, t. 2, p. 55.
1398Stenographic Record of the Debates in the Third Duma, 1911, p. 2911.
of Zionism, one hinders in a thousand and one ways the functioning of Jewish
schools, manifests hatred towards their jargon (Yiddish), and the Jewish
Socialist Party itself is boycotted by the Polish SocialDemocrats. 1399 Even in
Austria, although a country of Central Europe, hatred towards the Jews was still
alive, and many restrictions remained in force, such as the Karlsbad baths:
sometimes they were simply closed to the Jews, sometimes they could only go
there in the summer, and the winter Jews could only access it under strict
control.1400
But the system of limitations in Russia itself fully justified the grievances
expressed in the Jewish Encyclopdia as a whole: The position of the Jews is
highly uncertain, inasmuch as it depends on how the law is interpreted by those
responsible for applying it, even at the lowest level of the hierarchy, or even
simply their goodwill This blur is due to the extreme difficulty of
achieving uniform interpretation and application of the laws limiting the rights
of the Jews Their many provisions have been supplemented and modified by
numerous decrees signed by the emperor on the proposal of various
ministries and which, moreover, were not always reported in the General
Code of Laws; Even if he has an express authorisation issued by the
competent authority, the Jew is not certain that his rights are intangible; A
refusal emanating from a junior official, an anonymous letter sent by a
competitor, or an approach made in the open by a more powerful rival seeking
the expropriation of a Jew, suffice to condemn him to vagrancy.1401
Stolypin understood very well the absurdity of such a state of affairs, and
the irresistible movement that then pushed for a status of equality for the Jews,
a status that already existed to a large extent in Russia.
The number of Jews established outside the Pale of Settlement increased
steadily from year to year. After 1903, the Jews had access to an additional 101
places of residence, and the number of these was still significantly increased
under Stolypin, which implemented a measure which the tsar had not taken in
1906 and which the Duma had rejected in 1907. The former Jewish
Encyclopdia indicates that the number of these additional places of residence
amounted to 291 in 191019121402; As for the new Encyclopdia, it puts the
number to 299 for the year 1911.1403
The old Encyclopdia reminds us that from the summer of 1905 onwards,
in the wake of revolutionary events, the governing bodies [of educational
establishments] did not take into account the numerus clausus for three
years.1404 From August 1909 onwards, the latter was reduced from what it was
before in the higher and secondary schools (now 5% in the capitals, 10%

1399Vl. Jabotinsky, Homo homini lupus, Felietony, pp. 111113.

1400JE, t. 9, p. 314.
1401JE, t. 13, pp. 622625.
1402JE, t. 5, p. 822.
1403SJE, t. 5, p, 315.
1404JE, t. 13, p. 55.
outside the Pale of Settlement, 15% within it 1405), but subject to compliance.
However, since the proportion of Jewish students was 11% at the University of
Saint Petersburg and 24% at that of Odessa 1406, this measure was felt to be a
new restriction. A restrictive measure was adopted in 1911: the numerus clausus
was extended to the outside world1407 (for boys only, and in girls institutions the
real percentage was 13.5% in 1911). At the same time, artistic, commercial,
technical and vocational schools accepted Jews without restrictions. After
secondary and higher education, the Jews rushed into vocational education
which they had neglected until then. Although in 1883 Jews in all municipal
and regional vocational schools accounted for only 2% of the workforce, 12%
of boys and 17% of girls in 1898.1408 In addition, Jewish youth filled private
higher education institutions; thus, in 1912, the Kiev Institute of Commerce
had 1,875 Jewish students, and the PsychoNeurological Institute, thousands.
Beginning in 1914, any private educational institution could provide courses in
the language of its choice.1409
It is true that compulsory education for all was part of the logic of the time.
Stolypins main task was to carry out the agrarian reform, thus creating a
solid class of peasantowners. His companion in arms, Minister of Agriculture
A. V. Krivoshein, who was also in favour of abolishing the Pale of Settlement,
insisted at the same time that be limited the right of anonymous companies
with shares to proceed with the purchase of land, to the extent that it was likely
to result in the formation of a significant Jewish land capital; indeed, the
penetration into the rural world of Jewish speculative capital risked jeopardising
the success of the agrarian reform (at the same time he expressed the fear that
this would lead to the emergence of antiSemitism unknown until then in the
countryside of Greater Russia1410). Neither Stolypin nor Krivoshein could allow
that the peasants remain in misery due to the fact of not owning land. In 1906,
Jewish agricultural settlements were also deprived of the right to acquire land
belonging to the State, which was now reserved for peasants.1411
The economist M. Bernadski cited the following figures for the prewar
period: 2.4% of Jews worked in agriculture, 4.7% were liberal professionals,
11.5% were domestic servants, 31% worked in commerce (Jews accounted for
35% of merchants in Russia), 36% in industry; 18% of the Jews were settled in
the Pale of Settlement.1412 In comparing the latter figure to the 2.4% mentioned
above, the number of Jews residing in rural areas and occupied in agriculture
1405SJE, t. 7, p. 352.
1406S. V. Pozner, Ievrei v obschechei chkole (The Jews in the Public School), SPb,
Razoum, 1914, p. 54.
1407SJE, t. 6, p. 854; t. 7, p. 352.
1408JE, t. 13, pp. 5558.
1409I. M. Troitsky, Ievrei vrussko chkole (The Jews and the Russian School), in BJWR1, pp.
358, 360.
1410K. A. Krivoshein, A. V. Krivoshein (18571921) Evo znatchenie v istorii Rossii natchal XX
veka (A. V. Krivoshein: his role in the history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth
century), Paris, 1973, pp. 290, 292.
1411JE, t. 7, p. 757.
had not increased significantly, while according to Bernadski, it was in the
interest of the Russians that Jewish forces and resources were investing
themselves in all areas of production, any limitation imposed on them
represented a colossal waste of the productive forces of the country. He
pointed out that in 1912, for example, the Society of producers and
manufacturers of an industrial district in Moscow had approached the President
of the Council of Ministers so that the Jews would not be prevented from
playing their role of intermediary link with Russian industrial production
centres.1413
B. A. Kamenka, chairman of the Board of Directors of Azov Bank and the
Don, turned to the financing of the mining and metallurgical industry and
sponsored eleven important enterprises in the Donets and Urals region. 1414
There was no restriction on the participation of Jews in jointstock companies in
the industry, but the limitations imposed on jointstock companies wishing to
acquire property triggered an outcry in all financial and industrial circles. And
the measures taken by Krivoshein were to be abrogated.1415
V. Choulguine made the following comparison: The Russian power
seemed very ingenuous in the face of the perfectly targeted offensive of the
Jews. The Russian power reminded one of the flood of a long and peaceful
river: an endless expanse plunged into a soft sleepiness; there is water, oh my
God there is, but it is only sleeping water. Now this same river, a few versts
farther away, enclosed by strong dikes, is transformed into an impetuous torrent,
whose bubbling waters precipitate itself madly into turbines.1416
It is the same rhetoric that is heard on the side of liberal economic thought:
Russia, so poor in highly skilled workforce, seems to want to further
increase its ignorance and its intellectual lagging in relation to the West.
Denying the Jews access to the levers of production amounts to a deliberate
refusal to use their productive forces.1417
Stolypin saw very well that this was wasteful. But the different sectors of
the Russian economy were developing too unevenly. And he regarded the
restrictions imposed on Jews as a kind of customs tax that could only be
temporary, until the Russians consolidated their forces in public life as well as
in the sphere of the economy, these protective measures secreted an unhealthy
greenhouse climate for them. Finally (but after how many years?), the
government began to implement the measures for the development of the
peasant world, from which were to result a true and genuine equality of rights

1412M. Bernadski, Ievrci I ruskoye narodnoe khoziastvo (The Jews and the Russian
economy), in Chtchit literatourny sbornik / pod red. L. Andreeva, M. Gorkovo and E
Sologouba. 3e izd., Dop., M. Rousskoye Obchtchestvo dlia izoutchenia ievreiskoi jisni,
1916. pp. 28, 30; SJE, t. 7, p. 386.
1413Bernadski, Chtchit, pp. 30, 31.
1414RJE, t. 1, p. 536.
1415Krivoshein, pp. 292293.
1416Choulguine, p. 74.
1417Bernadski, pp. 27. 28.
between social classes and nationalities; a development which would have made
the Russians fear of the Jews disappear and which would have put a definitive
end to all the restrictions of which the latter were still victims.
Stolypin was considering using Jewish capital to stimulate Russias
economy by welcoming their many jointstock companies, enterprises,
concessions and natural resource businesses. At the same time, he understood
that private banks, dynamic and powerful, often preferred to agree among
themselves rather than compete, but he intended to counterbalance this
phenomenon by nationalising credit, that is, the strengthening of the role of
the State Bank and the creation of a fund to help entrepreneurial peasants who
could not obtain credit elsewhere.
But Stolypin was making another political calculation: he thought that
obtaining equal rights would take some of the Jews away from the revolutionary
movement. (Among other arguments, he also put forward: at the local level,
bribery was widely used to circumvent the law, which had the effect of
spreading corruption within the State apparatus.)
Among the Jews, those who did not give in to fanaticism realised that,
despite the continued restrictions, in spite of the increasingly virulent (but
impotent) attacks on rightwing circles, those years offered more and more
favourable conditions to the Jews and were necessarily leading to equal rights.
Just a few years later, thrown into emigration by the great revolution, two
renowned Jewish figures meditated on prerevolutionary Russia:
Selftaught out of poverty at the cost of the greatest efforts, he had passed
his bachelors degree as an external candidate at the age of thirty and obtained
his university degree at thirtyfive; he had actively participated in the Liberation
Movement and had always regarded Zionism as an illusory dreamhis name
was Iosif Menassievich Bikerman. From the height of his fiftyfive years of age
he wrote: Despite the regulations of May [1882] and other provisions of the
same type, despite the Pale of Settlement and numerus clausus, despite
Kishinev and Bialystok, I was a free man and I felt as such, a man who had
before him a wide range of possibilities to work in all kinds of fields, who could
enrich himself both materially and spiritually, who could fight to improve his
situation and conserve his strength to continue the fight. The restrictions were
always diminishing under the pressure of the times and under ours, and during
the war a wide breach was opened in the last bastion of our inequality. It was
necessary to wait another five or fifteen years before obtaining complete
equality before the law; we could wait.1418
Belonging to the same generation as Bikerman, he shared very different
convictions and his life was also very different: a convinced Zionist, a doctor
(he taught for a time at the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva), an essayist and a
politician, Daniil Samoylovich Pasmanik, an immigrant as well, wrote at the
same time as Bikerman the following lines: Under the tsarist regime, the Jews

1418I. M. Bikerman, Rossia i ruskoye Ivreisstvo (Russia and its Jewish Community), in Rossia i
ievrei (The Conservative and Destructive Elements among the Jews), in RaJ, p. 33.
lived infinitely better and, whatever may be said of them, their conditions of life
before the warboth materially as well as otherswere excellent. We were
then deprived of political rights, but we could develop intense activity in the
sphere of our national and cultural values, while the chronic misery that had
been our lot disappeared progressively.1419The chronic economic slump of
the Jewish masses diminished day by day, leaving room for material ease,
despite the senseless deportations of several tens of thousands of Jews out of the
Front areas. The statistics of the mutual credit societies are the best proof of
the economic progress enjoyed by the Jews of Russia during the decade
preceding the coup. And so it was in the field of culture. Despite the police
regimeit was absolute freedom in comparison with the present Bolshevik
regimeJewish cultural institutions of all kinds prospered. Everything was
bursting with activity: organisations were booming, creation was also very alive
and vast prospects were now open.1420
In a little more than a century, under the Russian crown, the Jewish
community had grown from 820,000 (including the Kingdom of Poland) to
more than five million representatives, even though more than one and a half
million chose to emigrate,1421an increase of a factor of eight between 1800
and 1914. Over the last 90 years, the number of Jews had multiplied by 3.5
(going from 1.5 million to 5,250,000), whereas during the same period the total
population of the Empire (including the new territories) had multiplied by only
2.5.
However, the Jews were still subject to restrictions, which fuelled anti
Russian propaganda in the United States. Stolypin thought he could overcome it
by explaining it, inviting members of Congress and American journalists to
come and see, in Russia itself. But in the autumn of 1911, the situation became
so severe that it led to the denunciation of a trade agreement with the United
States dating back eighty years. Stolypin did not yet know what the effect of a
passionate speech of the future peacemaker, Wilson, might be, nor what the
unanimity of the American Congress could mean. He did not live enough to
know.
Stolypin, who imprinted its direction, gave its light and name to the decade
before the First World War,all the while he was the object of furious attacks
on the part of both the Cadets and the extreme right, when deputies of all ranks
dragged him in the mud because of the law on the Zemstvo reform in the
western provinceswas assassinated in September 1911.
The first head of the Russian government to have honestly raised and
attempted to resolve, in spite of the Emperors resistance, the question of
equality for the Jews, fellirony of History!under the blows of a Jew.
Such is the fate of the middle way

1419D. S. Pasmanik, Ruskaya revolutsia i ievreisstvo (Bolshevik i iudaism) (The Russian

Revolution and the Jews [Bolshevism and Judaism]), Paris. 1923, pp. 195196.
1420D. S. Pasmanik, Tchevo je my dobivaemsia? (But what do we want?), RaJ, p. 218.
1421SJE, t. 7, pp. 384385.
 Seven times attempts had been made to kill Stolypin, and it was
revolutionary groups more or less numerous that had fermented the attacksin
vain. Here, it was an isolated individual who pulled it off.
At a very young age, Bogrov did not have sufficient intellectual maturity to
understand the political importance of Stolypins role. But from his childhood
he had witnessed the daily and humiliating consequences of the inequality of the
Jews, and his family, his milieu, his own experience cultivated his hatred for
imperial power. In the Jewish circles of Kiev, which seemed ideologically
mobile, no one was grateful to Stolypin for his attempts to lift the restrictions
imposed on the Jews, and even if this feeling had touched some of the better off,
it was counterbalanced by the memory of the energetic way in which he had
repressed the revolution of 19051906, as well as by the discontent with his
efforts to nationalise credit in order to openly compete with private capital.
The Jewish circles in Kiev (but also in Petersburg where the future murderer
had also stayed) were under the magnetic influence of a field of absolute
radicalism, which led young Bogrov not only to feel entitled, but to consider it
his duty to kill Stolypin.
This field was so powerful that it allowed the following combination:
Bogrovsenior rose in society, he is a capitalist who prospers in the existing
system; Bogrovjunior works at destroying this system and his father, after the
attack, publicly declares that he is proud of him.
In fact, Bogrov was not so isolated: he was discreetly applauded in the
circles which once manifested their unwavering fidelity to the regime.
This gunshot that put an end to the hope that Russia ever recovered its
health could have been equally fired at the tsar himself. But Bogrov had decided
that it was impossible, for (as he declared himself) it might have led to
persecution against the Jews, to have damaging consequences on their legal
position. While the Prime Minister would simply not have such effects, he
thought. But he was deceived heavily when he imagined that his act would
serve to improve the lot of the Jews of Russia.
And Menshikov himself, who had first reproached Stolypin with the
concessions he had made to the Jews, now lamented his disappearance: our
great man, our best political leader for a century and a halfassassinated! And
the assassin is a Jew! A Jew who did not hesitate to shoot the Prime Minister of
Russia!? The gunshot of Kiev must be considered as a warning signal the
situation is very serious we must not cry revenge, but finally decide to
resist!1422
And what happened then in Kiev the reactionary where the Jews were so
numerous? In the first hours after the attack, they were massively seized with
panic and began to leave the city. Moreover, the Jews were struck with terror
not only in Kiev, but in the most remote corners of the Pale of Settlement and of
the rest of Russia.1423 The Club of Russian Nationalists expressed its intention

1422Novoie Vremia, 1911, 10 (23) Sept., p. 4.

1423Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 249.
to circulate a petition to drive out all the Jews of Kiev (which remained at the
stage of intentions). There was not the start of a beginning of pogrom. The
President of the youth organisation The TwoHeaded Eagle, Galkin, called for
destroying the offices of the local security and for busting some Jew: he was
immediately neutralised. The new Prime Minister, Kokovtsov, urgently recalled
all Cossack regiments (they were manuvring away from the city) and sent a
very firm telegram to all the governors: to prevent pogroms by any means,
including force. The troops were concentrated in greater numbers than during
the revolution. (Sliosberg: if pogroms had broken out in 1911, Kiev would
have been the scene of a carnage comparable to the horrors of the time of
Bogdan Khmelnitsky.1424)
No, nowhere in Russia there was the slightest pogrom. (Despite this, there
has been much written, and insistently, that the tsarist power had never dreamed
of anything but one thing: to organise an antiJewish pogrom.)
Of course, the prevention of public disorder is one of the primary duties of
the State, and when this mission is fulfilled, it does not have to expect
recognition. But that under such extreme circumstancesthe assassination of
the head of government, that it was possible to avoid pogroms, the threat of
which caused panic among the Jews, it nevertheless merited a small mention, if
only in passing. Well, no, we did not hear anything like that and no one spoke
about it.
Difficult to believe, but the Kiev Jewish community did not publicly
express condemnation nor regret regarding this assassination. On the contrary.
After the execution of Bogrov, many Jewish students were ostensibly in
mourning.
However, all this, the Russians noted it. Thus, in December 1912, Rozanov
wrote: After [Stolypins assassination] something broke in my relationship [to
the Jews]: would a Russian ever have dared to kill Rothschild or any other of
their great men?1425
If we look at it from a historical point of view, two important arguments
prevent the act committed by Bogrov from being considered on behalf of the
powers of internationalism. The first and most important: it was not the case.
Not only the book written by his brother 1426, but different neutral sources
suggest that Bogrov really believed that he could work this way to improve the
lot of the Jews. And the second: to return to certain uncomfortable episodes in
history, to examine them attentively to deplore them, is to assume ones
responsibilities; but to deny them and wash ones hands, thats just low.
Yet this is what happened almost immediately. In October 1911, the Duma
was arrested by the Octobrists on the murky circumstances of the assassination
of Stolypin. This provoked an immediate protest from the deputy Nisselovitch:
1424Ibidem.
1425Perepiska V. V. Rozanova and M. O. Gerschenzona (The correspondence of V. V. Rozanov
and M. O. Gerschenzon), Novy mir. 1991, no. 3, p. 232.
1426Vladimir Bogrov, Drnitri Bogrov I oubiestvo Stolypina (Dmitri Bogrov and the
assassination of Stolypin), Berlin, 1931.
why, when formulating their interpellation, did the Octobrists not conceal the
fact that the murderer of Stolypin was Jewish? It was there, he declared, anti
Semitism!
I shall have to endure this incomparable argument myself. Seventy years
later, I was the object of a heavy accusation on the part of the Jewish
community in the United States: why, in my turn, did I not conceal, why did I
say that the assassin of Stolypin was a Jew 1427? It does not matter if I have
endeavoured to make a description as complete as possible. It does not matter
what the fact of being Jew represented in the motivations of his act. No, non
dissimulation betrayed my antiSemitism!!
At the time, Guchkov replied with dignity: I think that there is much more
antiSemitism in Bogrovs very act. I would suggest to the Deputy Nisselovitch
that he should address his passionate words not to us but to his fellow co
religionists. Let him use all the force of his eloquence to convince them to keep
away from two profane professions: that of spy in the service of the secret
police and that of terrorist. He would thus render a much greater service to the
members of his community!1428
But what can one ask of the Jewish memory when Russian history itself has
allowed this murder to be effaced from its memory as an event without great
significance, as a smear as marginal as it is negligible. It was only in the 80s
that I started to pull it out of oblivionfor seventy years, to mention it was
considered inappropriate.
As the years go by, more events and meanings come to our eyes.
More than once I have meditated on the whims of History: on the
unpredictability of the consequences it raises on our pathI speak of the
consequences of our actions. The Germany of William II opened the way for
Lenin to destroy Russia, and twentyeight years later it found itself divided for
half a century.Poland contributed to the strengthening of the Bolsheviks in the
year 1919, which was so difficult for them, and it harvested 1939, 1944, 1956,
1980.With what eagerness Finland helped Russian revolutionaries, she who
could not bear, who did not suffer from the particular freedoms at her disposal
but within Russiaand, in return, she suffered forty years of political
humiliation (Finlandisation).In 1914, England wanted to put down the
power of Germany, its competitor on the world stage, and it lost its position of
great power, and it was the whole of Europe that had been destroyed. In
Petrograd, the Cossacks remained neutral both in February and in October; a
year later, they underwent their genocide (and many of the victims were these
same Cossacks).In the first days of July 1917, the S.R. of the left approached
the Bolsheviks, then formed a semblance of a coalition, a broad platform; a
year later they were crushed as no autocracy could have had the means to do so.
1427In The Red Wheel, First Knot, August Fourteen, ed. Fayard / Seuil.
1428A. Guchkov, Retch v Gosudarstvennoi Doume 15 Oct. 1911 (Address to the Duma of 15
Oct. 1911)A. I. Goutchkov v Tretie Gosoudarstvenno Doume (19071912), Sbornik
retchei (Collection of speeches delivered by A. Guchkov to The Third Duma), Spb, 1912, p.
163.
 These distant consequences, none of us are capable of foreseeing them,
ever. The only way to guard against such errors is to always be guided by the
compass of divine morality. Or, as the people say: Do not dig a pit for others,
you will fall into it yourself.
Similarly, if the assassination of Stolypin had cruel consequences for
Russia, the Jews neither derived any benefit from it.
Everyone can see things in his own way, but I see here the giant footsteps
of History, and I am struck by the unpredictable character of its results.
Bogrov killed Stolypin, thus thinking of protecting the Jews from
oppression. Stolypin would in any case have been removed from office by the
Emperor, but he would surely have been recalled again in 191416 because of
the dizzying deficiency in men able to govern; and under his government we
would not have had such a lamentable end neither in the war nor in the
revolution. (Assuming that with him in power we would have engaged in this
war.)
First footstep of History: Stolypin is killed, Russia works its last nerves in
war and lies under the heel of the Bolsheviks.
Second footstep: however fierce they are, the Bolsheviks reveal themselves
as being more lame than the imperial government, abandoning half of Russia to
the Germans a quarter of a century later, including Kiev.
Third footstep: the Nazis invest in Kiev without any difficulty and
annihilate its Jewish community.
Again the city of Kiev, once again a month of September, but thirty years
after Bogrovs revolver shot.
And still in Kiev, still in 1911, six months before the assassination of
Stolypin, had started what would become the Beilis affair1429. There is good
reason to believe that under Stolypin, justice would not have been degraded as
such. One clue: one knows that once, examining the archives of the Department
of Security, Stolypin came across a note entitled The Secret of the Jews
(which anticipated the Protocols1430), in which was discussed the
International Jewish plot. Here is the judgement he made: There may be
logic, but also bias The government cannot use under any circumstance this
kind of method.1431 As a result, the official ideology of the tsarist government
never relied on the Protocols.1432
Thousands and thousands of pages have been written about the Beilis trial.
Anyone who would like to study closely all the meanders of the investigation,
of the public opinion, of the trial itself, would have to devote at least several
years to it. This would go beyond the limits of this work. Twenty years after the
event, under the Soviet regime, the daily reports of the police on the progress of
1429See infra, following pages.
1430The famous forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
1431Sliosberg*, t. 2, pp. 283284.
1432R. Nudelman, Doklad na seminare: Sovetskii antisemitizmpritchiny i prognozy
(Presentation at the seminar: Soviet antisemitismcauses and prognoses), in 22, review
of the Jewish intelligentsia of the USSR in Israel, Tel Aviv, 1978, no. 3, p. 145.
the trial were published1433; they can be commended to the attention of
amateurs. It goes without saying that the verbatim record of the entire
proceedings was also published. Not to mention the articles published in the
press.
Andrei Yushchinsky, a 12yearold boy, pupil of a religious institution in
Kiev, is the victim of a savage and unusual murder: there are fortyseven
punctures on his body, which indicate a certain knowledge of anatomythey
were made to the temple, to the veins and arteries of the neck, to the liver, to the
kidneys, to the lungs, to the heart, with the clear intention of emptying him of
his blood as long as he was still alive, and in additionaccording to the traces
left by the blood flowin a standing position (tied and gagged, of course). It
can only be the work of a very clever criminal who certainly did not act alone.
The body was discovered only a week later in a cave on the territory of the
factory of Zaitsev. But the murder was not committed there.
The first accusations do not refer to ritual motives, but the latter soon
appears: the connection is made with the beginning of Jewish Passover and the
construction of a new synagogue on the grounds of Zaitsev (a Jew). Four
months after the murder, this version of the accusation leads to the arrest of
Menahem Mendel Beilis, 37, employed at the Zaitsev factory. He is arrested
without any real charges against him. How did all this happen?
The investigation into the murder was carried out by the criminal police of
Kiev, a worthy colleague, obviously, of the Security section of Kiev, which had
gotten tangled up in the Bogrov affair1434 and thus caused the loss of Stolypin.
The work was entrusted to two nobodies in all respects similar to Kouliabko,
Bogrovs curator, Michtchouk, and Krassovsky, assisted by dangerous
incompetents (they cleaned the snow in front of the cave to facilitate the
passage of the corpulent commissioner of police, thus destroying any potential
indications of the presence of the murderers). But worse still, rivalry settled
between the investigatorsit was to whom the merit of the discovery of the
guilty person would be attributed, by whom the best version would be proposed
and they did not hesitate to get in each others way, to sow confusion in the
investigation, to put pressure on the witnesses, to stop the competitors
indicators; Krassovksy went so far as to put makeup on the suspect before
introducing him to a witness! This parody of inquiry was conducted as if it were
a trivial story, without the importance of the event even crossing their minds.
When the trial finally opened, two and a half years later, Michtchouk had run
off to Finland to escape the charge of falsification of material evidence, a
significant collaborator of Krassovsky had also disappeared, and as for the
latter, dismissed of his duties, he had switched sides and was now working for
Beiliss lawyers.

1433Protsess Beilisa v otsenke Departamenta politsii (The Beilis trial seen by the Police
Department), Krasny Arkhiv, 1931, t. 44, pp. 85125.
1434See supra, chapter 9.
 For nearly two years, we went from one false version to another; for a long
time the accusation was directed to the family of the victim, until the latter was
completely put out of the question. It became clearer and clearer that the
prosecution was moving towards a formal accusation against Beilis and towards
his trial.
He was therefore accused of murdereven though the charges against him
were doubtfulbecause he was a Jew. But how was it possible in the twentieth
century to inflate a trial to the point of making it a threat to an entire people?
Beyond the person of Beilis, the trial turned in fact into an accusation against
the Jewish people as a wholeand, since then, the atmosphere around the
investigation and then the trial became superheated, the affair took on an
international dimension, gained the whole of Europe, and then America. (Until
then, trials for ritual murders had taken place rather in the Catholic milieu:
Grodno (1816), Velij (1825), Vilnius, the Blondes case (1900), the Koutais
affair (1878) took place in Georgia, Doubossar (1903) in Moldavia, while in
Russia strictly speaking, there was only the Saratov affair in 1856. Sliosberg,
however, does not fail to point out that the Saratov affair also had also a
Catholic origin, while in Beiliss case it was observed that the band of thieves
who had been suspected at one time was composed of Poles, that the ritual
crime expert appointed at the trial was a Catholic, and that the attorney
Tchaplinski was also Polish.1435)
The findings of the investigation were so questionable that they were only
retained by the Kiev indictment chambre by three votes to two. While the
monarchist right had sparked an extensive press campaign, Purishkevich
expressed himself in the Duma in April 1911: We do not accuse the Jews as a
whole, we cry for the truth about this strange and mysterious crime. Is there a
Jewish sect that advocates ritual murders? If there are such fanatics, let them
be stigmatised; as for us, we are fighting against many sects in Russia, our
own1436, but at the same time he declared that, according to him, the affair would
be stifled in the Duma by fear of the press. Indeed, at the opening of the trial,
the rightwing nationalist Chulguine declared himself opposed to it being held
and to the miserable baggage of the judicial authorities in the columns of the
patriotic Kievian (for which he was accused by the extreme Right to be sold to
the Jews). But, in view of the exceptionally monstrous character of the crime,
no one dared to go back to the accusation in order to resume the investigation
from scratch.
On the other side, the liberalradicals also launched a public campaign
relayed by the press, and not only the Russian press, but that of the whole
world. The tension had reached a point of no return. Sustained by the partiality
of the accusation, it only escalated, and the witnesses themselves were soon
attacked. According to V. Rozanov, every sense of measure had been lost,

1435Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 2324, 37.

1436Stenographic Record of the Debates at the Third Duma, 1911, pp. 31193120.
especially in the Jewish press: The iron fist of the Jew falls on venerable
professors, on members of the Duma, on writers1437
However, the ultimate attempts to get the investigation back on track had
failed. The stable near the Zaitsev factory, which was initially neglected by
Krassovsky and then assumed to have been the scene of the crime, burned down
two days before the date fixed for its examination by hasty investigators. A
brazen journalist, BrazulBrouchkovsky, conducted his own investigation
assisted by the same Krassovsky, now released from his official duties. (It must
be remembered that BonchBruevich1438 published a pamphlet accusing Brazoul
of venality.1439) They put forward a version of the facts according to which the
murder was allegedly committed by Vera Cheberyak, whose children frequented
Andrei Yushchinsky, herself flirting with the criminal underworld. During their
long months of inquiry, the two Cheberyak sons died under obscure
circumstances; Vera accused Krassovsky of poisoning them, who in turn
accused her of killing her own children. Ultimately, their version was that
Yushchinsky had been killed by Cheberyak in person with the intention of
simulating a ritual murder. She said that the lawyer Margoline had offered her
40,000 rubles to endorse the crime, which he denied at the trial even though he
was subject at the same moment to administrative penalties for indelicacy.
Trying to disentangle the innumerable details of this judicial imbroglio
would only make the understanding even more difficult. (It should also be
mentioned that the metis of the revolution and the secret police were also
involved. In this connection, mention should be made of the equivocal role and
strange behaviour during the trial of LieutenantColonel Gendarmerie Pavel
Ivanovthe very one who, in defiance of all laws, helped Bogrov, already
condemned to death, to write a new version of the reasons which would have
prompted him to kill Stolypin, a version in which the full weight of
responsibility fell on the organs of Security to which Ivanov did not belong.)
The trial was about to open in a stormy atmosphere. It lasted a month:
SeptemberOctober 1913. It was incredibly heavy: 213 witnesses summoned to
the bar (185) presented themselves, still slowed down by the procedural
artifices raised by the parties involved; the prosecutor Vipper was not up to the
standard of the group of brilliant lawyersGruzenberg, Karabtchevski,
Maklakov, Zaroudnywho did not fail to demand that the blunders he uttered
be recorded in the minutes, for example: the course of this trial is hampered by
Jewish gold; they [the Jews in general] seem to laugh at us, see, we have
committed a crime, but no one will dare to hold us accountable. 1440 (Not
surprisingly, during the trial, Vipper received threatening letterson some were

1437V. V. Rozanov, Oboniatelnoye i osiazatelnoye otnochenie ievreyev krovi (The Olfactory and
Tactile Relationship of the Jews to Blood), Stockholm, 1934, p. 110.
1438Vladimir BonchBruevich (18731955), sociologist, publisher, publicist very attached to
Lenin, collaborator of Pravda, specialist in religious matters.
1439N. V. Krylenko, Za piat let. 19181922: Obvinitelnye retchi. (Five years, 19181922:
Indictments), M., 1923, p. 359.
1440Ibidem, pp. 356, 364.
drawn a slipknotand not just him, but the civil parties, the expert of the
prosecution, probably also the defence lawyers; the dean of the jury also feared
for his life.) There was a lot of turmoil around the trial, selling passes for access
to hearings, all of Kievs educated people were boiling. The man in the street,
him, remained indifferent.
A detailed medical examination was carried out. Several professors spread
their differences as to whether or not Yushchinsky had remained alive until the
last wound, and how acute were the sufferings he had endured. But it was the
theologicalscientific expertise that was at the centre of the trial: it focused on
the very principle of the possibility of ritual murders perpetrated by Jews, and it
was on this that the whole world focused its attention. 1441 The defence appealed
to recognised authorities in the field of Hebraism, such as Rabbi Maze, a
specialist in the Talmud. The expert appointed by the Orthodox Church,
Professor I. Troitsky of the Theological Academy of Petersburg, concluded his
intervention by rejecting the accusation of an act of cold blood attributable to
the Jews; he pointed out that the Orthodox Church had never made such
accusations, that these were peculiar to the Catholic world. (Bikerman later
recalled that in Imperial Russia the police officers themselves cut short almost
every year rumours about the Christian blood shed during the Jewish Passover,
otherwise we would have had a case of ritual murder not once every few
decades, but every year.1442 The main expert cited by the prosecution was the
Catholic priest Pranaitis. To extend the public debate, the prosecutors demanded
that previous ritual murder cases be examined, but the defence succeeded in
rejecting the motion. These discussions on whether the murder was ritual or not
ritual only further increased the emotion that the trial had created through the
whole world.
But it was necessary that a judgment should be pronouncedon this
accused, and not anotherand this mission went to a dull jury composed of
peasants painfully supplemented by two civil servants and two petty bourgeois;
all were exhausted by a month of trials, they fell asleep during the reading of the
materials of the case, requested that the trial be shortened, four of them solicited
permission to return home before its conclusion and some needed medical
assistance.
Nevertheless, these jurors judged on the evidence: the accusations against
Beilis were unfounded, not proved. And Beilis was acquitted.
And that was the end of it. No new search for the culprits was undertaken,
and this strange and tragic murder remained unexplained.
Insteadand this was in the tradition of Russian weaknessit was
imagined (not without ostentation) to erect a chapel on the very spot where the
corpse of young Yushchinsky had been discovered, but this project provoked

1441Retch, 1913, 26 Oct. (8 Nov.), p. 3

1442Bikerman, RaJ, p. 29
many protests, because it was judged reactionary. And Rasputin dissuaded the
tsar from following up on it.1443
This trial, heavy and illconducted, with a whitehot public opinion for a
whole year, in Russia as in the rest of the world, was rightly considered a battle
of TsouShima.1444 It was reported in the European press that the Russian
government had attacked the Jewish people, but that it was not the latter that
had lost the war, it was the Russian State itself.
As for the Jews, with all their passion, they were never to forgive this
affront of the Russian monarchy. The fact that the law had finally triumphed did
nothing to change their feelings.
It would be instructive, however, to compare the Beilis trial with another
that took place at the same time (191315) in Atlanta, USA; a trial which then
made great noise: the Jew Leo Frank, also accused of the murder of a child (a
girl raped and murdered), and again with very uncertain charges. He was
condemned to be hung, and during the proceedings of cassation an armed crowd
snatched him from his prison and hanged him. 1445 On the individual level, the
comparison is in favour of Russia. But the Leo Frank affair had but little echo in
public opinion, and did not become an object of reproach.

There is an epilogue in the Beilis case.

Threatened with revenge by extreme rightwing groups, Beilis left Russia
and went to Palestine with his family. In 1920 he moved to the United States.
He died of natural causes, at the age of sixty, in the vicinity of New York.1446
Justice Minister Shcheglovitov (according to some sources, he had given
instructions for the case to be elucidated as a ritual murder 1447) was shot by the
Bolsheviks.
In 1919 the trial of Vera Cheberyak took place. It did not proceed according
to the abhorred procedures of tsarismno question of popular jury!and lasted
only about forty minutes in the premises of the Cheka of Kiev. A member of the
latter, who was arrested in the same year by the Whites, noted in his testimony
that Vera Cheberyak was interrogated exclusively by Jewish Chekists,
beginning with Sorine [the head of the Blumstein Cheka]. Commander
Faierman subjected her to humiliating treatment, ripped off her clothes and
struck her with the barrel of his revolver She said: You can do whatever you
want with me, but what I said, I will not come back on it What I said at the

1443Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 47.
1444An allusion to the terrible naval reverse suffered by Russia in its war against Japan (2728
May 1905).
1445V. Lazaris, Smert Leo Franka (Death of Leo Frank), in 22, 1984, no. 36, pp. 155159.
1446SJE, t. 1, pp. 317, 318.
1447Ibidem, p. 317.
Beilis trial, nobody pushed me to say it, nobody bribed me She was shot on
the spot.1448
In 1919, Vipper, now a Soviet official, was discovered in Kaluga and tried
by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal. The Bolshevik prosecutor Krylenko
pronounced the following words: Whereas he presents a real danger to the
Republic that there be one Vipper less among us! (This macabre joke
suggested that R. Vipper, a professor of medieval history, was still alive.)
However, the Tribunal merely sent Vipper to a concentration camp until the
communist regime be definitively consolidated.1449 After that, we lose his track.

Beilis was acquitted by peasants, those Ukrainian peasants accused of having

participated in the pogroms against the Jews at the turn of the century, and who
were soon to know the collectivisation and organised famine of 193233a
famine that journalists have ignored and that has not been included in the
liabilities of this regime.
Here is yet another of these footsteps of History

1448Chekist o Tcheka (A Chekist speaks of the Cheka). Na tchoujo storone: Istoriko

literatournye sborniki / pod red. S. P. Melgounova, t. 9. Berlin: Vataga; Prague: Plamia,
1925, pp. 118, 135.
1449Krylenko, pp. 367368
 Chapter 11. Jews and Russians before the First World War:
The Growing Awareness

In Russiafor another ten years it escaped its ruinthe best minds among the
Russians and the Jews had had time to look back and evaluate from different
points of view the essence of our common life, to seriously consider the
question of culture and national destiny.
The Jewish people made its way through an everchanging present by
dragging behind it the tail of a comet of three thousand years of diaspora,
without ever losing consciousness of being a nation without language nor
territory, but with its own laws (Salomon Lourie), preserving its difference and
its specificity by the force of its religious and national tensionin the name of a
superior, metahistorical Providence. Have the Jews of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries sought to identify with the peoples who surrounded them, to
blend into them? It was certainly the Jews of Russia who, longer than their other
coreligionists, had remained in the core of isolation, concentrated on their
religious life and conscience. But, from the end of the nineteenth century, it was
precisely this Jewish community in Russia that began to grow stronger, to
flourish, and now the whole history of the Jewish community in the modern
age was placed under the sign of Russian Jewry, which also manifested a
sharp sense of the movement of History.1450
For their part, the Russian thinkers were perplexed by the particularism of
the Jews. And for them, in the nineteenth century, the question was how to
overcome it. Vladimir Solovyov, who expressed deep sympathy for the Jews,
proposed to do so by the love of the Russians towards the Jews.
Before him, Dostoyevsky had noticed the disproportionate fury provoked
by his remarks, certainly offensive but very scarce, about the Jewish people:
This fury is a striking testimony to the way the Jews themselves regard the
Russians and that, in the motives of our differences with the Jews, it is
perhaps not only the Russian people who bears all the responsibility, but that
these motives, obviously, have accumulated on both sides, and it cannot be said
on which side there is the most.1451

1450B. T. Dinour, Religioznonatsionalny oblik ruskovo ievreistava (The religious and national
aspects of the Jews of Russia), in BJWR-1, pp. 319, 322.
1451F. M. Dostoyevsky, Dnevnik pisatelia za 1877, 1880 i 1581 gody (Journal of a writer,
March 1877, chapter 2), M., L., 1929, 1877, Mart, gl 2, p. 78.
 From this same end of the nineteenth century, Teitel reports the following
observation: The Jews are in their majority materialists. Strong in them is the
aspiration to acquire material goods. But what contempt for these material
goods whenever it comes to the inner I, to national dignity! Why, in fact, the
mass of Jewish youthwho has completely turned away from religious
practice, which often does not even speak its mother tonguewhy did this
mass, if only for the sake of form, not convert to Orthodoxy, which would have
opened to it wide the doors of all the universities and would have given it
access to all the goods of the earth? Even the thirst for knowledge was not
enough, while science, superior knowledge was held by them in higher esteem
than fortune. What held them back was the concern not to abandon their co
religionists in need. (He also adds that going to Europe to study was not a good
solution either: Jewish students felt very uncomfortable in the West The
German Jew considered them undesirable, insecure people, noisy, disorderly,;
and this attitude was not only that of the German Jews, the French and Swiss
Jews were no exception.1452
As for D. Pasmanik, he also mentioned this category of Jews converted
under duress, who felt only more resentment towards the power and could only
oppose it. (From 1905, conversion was facilitated: it was no longer necessary to
go to orthodoxy, it was enough to become a Christian, and Protestantism was
more acceptable to many Jews. In 1905 was also repealed the prohibition to
return to Judaism.1453)
Another writer bitterly concluded, in 1924, that in the last decades
preceding the revolution it was not only the Russian government which
definitely ranked the Jewish people among the enemies of the country, but
even worse, it was a lot of Jewish politicians who ranked themselves among
these enemies, radicalising their position and ceasing to differentiate between
the government and the fatherland, that is, Russia The indifference of the
Jewish masses and their leaders to the destiny of Great Russia was a fatal
political error.1454
Of course, like any social process, thisand, moreover, in a context as
diverse and mobile as the Jewish milieudid not take place linearly, it was
split; in the hearts of many educated Jews, it provoked rifts. On the one hand,
belonging to the Jewish people confers a specific position in the whole of the
Russian milieu.1455 But to observe immediately a remarkable ambivalence: the
traditional sentimental attachment of many Jews to the surrounding Russian

1452I. L. Teitel, Iz moiii jizni za 40 let (Memories of 40 years of my life), Paris, I. Povolotski i
ko., 1925, pp. 227228.
1453JE, t. 11, p. 894.
1454V. S. Mandel, Konservativnye i pazrouchitelnye elementy v ievrestve (Conservative and
destructive elements among Jews), in RaJ, pp. 201, 203.
1455D. O. Linsky, O natsionalnom samosoznanii ruskovo ievreia (The national consciousness of
the Russian Jew), RaJ, p. 142.
world, their rootedness in this world, and at the same time an intellectual
rejection, a refusal across the board. Affection for an abhorred world.1456
This approach so painfully ambivalent could not fail to lead to equally
painfully ambivalent results. And when I. V. Hessen, in an intervention in the
second Duma in March 1907, after having denied that the revolution was still in
its phase of rising violence, thus denying rightwing parties the right to arise as
defenders of the culture against anarchy, exclaimed: We who are teachers,
doctors, lawyers, statisticians, literary men, would we be the enemies of
culture? Who will believe you, gentlemen?They shouted from the benches
of the right: You are the enemies of Russian culture, not of Jewish culture! 1457
Enemies, of course not, why go so far, butas the Russian party pointed out
are you really, unreservedly, our friends? The rapprochement was made difficult
precisely by this: how could these brilliant advocates, professors and doctors not
have in their heart of hearts primarily Jewish sympathies? Could they feel,
entirely and unreservedly, Russian by spirit? Hence the problem was even more
complicated. Were they able to take to heart the interests of the Russian State in
their full scope and depth?
During this same singular period, we see on the one hand that the Jewish
middle classes make a very clear choice to give secular education to their
children in the Russian language, and on the other there is the development of
publications in Yiddishand comes into use the term Yiddishism: that the
Jews remain Jewish, that they do not assimilate.
There was still a path to assimilation, doubtlessly marginal, but not
negligible: that of mixed marriages. And also a current of superficial
assimilation consisting in adapting artificial pseudonyms to the Russian way.
(And who did this most often?! The great sugar producers of Kiev Dobry 1458,
Babushkin1459, prosecuted during the war for agreement with the enemy. The
editor Iasny1460 that even the newspaper of constitutionaldemocrat orientation
Retch called an avid speculator, an unscrupulous shark.1461 Or the future
Bolshevik D. Goldenbach, who regarded all of Russia as a country without
worth but disguised himself as Riazanov to bother the readers with his
Marxist theoretician ratiocinations until his arrest in 1937.)
And it was precisely during these decades, and especially in Russia, that
Zionism developed. The Zionists were ironical about those who wanted to
assimilate, who imagined that the fate of the Jews of Russia was indissolubly
linked to the destiny of Russia itself.
And then, we must turn first to Vl. Jabotinsky, a brilliant and original
essayist, who was brought, in the years preceding the revolution, to express not

1456G. A. Landau, Revolioutsionnye idei v ievreskoi obctchestvennosti (Revolutionary Ideas

in Jewish Society), RaJ, p. 115.
1457Stenographic Record of the Debates of the Second Duma, 13 March 1907, p. 522.
1458Literally good, generous.
1459Formed from babushkagrandmother, granny.
1460Literally clear, bright.
1461P. G.Marodiory knigi 3 (The Marauders of the Book), in Retch, 1917, 6 May, s.
only his rejection of Russia but also his despair. Jabotinsky considered that
Russia was nothing more than a halt for the Jews on their historical journey and
that it was necessary to hit the roadto Palestine.
Passion ignited his words: it is not with the Russian people that we are in
contact, we learn to know it through its culture, mainly through its writers,
through the highest, the purest manifestations of the Russian spirit,and this
appreciation, we transpose it to the whole of the Russian world. Many of us,
born of the Jewish intelligentsia, love the Russian culture with a maddening and
degrading love with the degrading love of swine keepers for a queen. As for
the Jewish world, we discover it through the baseness and ugliness of everyday
life.1462
He is merciless towards those who seek to assimilate. Many of the servile
habits that developed in our psychology as our intelligentsia became russified,
have ruined the hope or the desire to keep Jewishness intact, and lead to its
disappearance. The average Jewish intellectual forgets himself: it is better not
to pronounce the word Jew, the times are no longer about that; we are
afraid to write: we the Jews, but we write: we the Russians and even: we
the Russkoffs. The Jew can occupy a prominent place in Russian society, but
he will always remain a second class Russian, and this, all the more so because
he retains a specific inclination of the soul.We are witnessing an epidemic
of baptisms for interest, sometimes for stakes far more petty than obtaining a
diploma. The thirty pennies for equal rights When abjuring our faith, strip
yourself also of our nationality.1463
The situation of the Jews in Russiaand not at any time, but precisely after
the years 19051906seemed to him desperately gloomy: The objective
reality, that is, the fact of living abroad, has turned itself against our people
today, and we are weak and helpless.Already in the past we knew we were
surrounded by enemies; this prison (Russia), a pack of dogs; the body
lying, covered with the wounds of the Jewish people of Russia, tracked,
surrounded by enemies and defenceless; six million human beings swarming
in a deep pit, a slow torture, a pogrom that does not end; and even,
according to him, newspapers financed by Jewish funds do not defend the
Jews in these times of unprecedented persecution. At the end of 1911, he
wrote: For several years now the Jews of Russia have been crammed on the
bench of the accused, despite the fact we are not revolutionaries, that we have
not sold Russia to the Japanese and that we are not Azefs 1464 or Bogrovs1465;
and in connection with Bogrov: This unfortunate young manhe was what he
was, at the hour of such an admirable death[!], was booed by a dozen brutes

1462Vl. Jabotinsky, [Sb] Felietony. SPb.: Tipografia Gerold, 1913, pp. 911.
1463Vl. Jabotinsky, [Sb] Felietony, pp. 16, 6263, 176180, 253254.
1464Azef Evno (15691918), terrorist, double agent (of the S.R. and the Okhrana), unmasked
by A. Bourtsev.
1465The assassin of Stolypin; Cf. supra, chapter 10.
from the cesspool of the Kievian Black Hundreds, come to ensure that the
execution had indeed taken place.1466
And, returning again and again to the Jewish community itself: Today we
are culturally deprived, as at the bottom of a slum, of an obscure
impasse.What we suffer above all is contempt for ourselves; what we need
above all is to respect ourselves The study of Jewishness must become for us
the central discipline Jewish culture is now the only plank of salvation for
us.1467
All of this, we can, yes, we can understand it, share it. (And we, Russians,
can do it, especially today, at the end of the twentieth century.)
It does not condemn those who, in the past, have campaigned for
assimilation: in the course of History there are times when assimilation is
undeniably desirable, when it represents a necessary stage of progress. This
was the case after the sixties of the nineteenth century, when the Jewish
intelligentsia was still in its embryonic state, beginning to adapt to the
surrounding environment, to a culture that had reached maturity. At that time,
assimilation did not mean denying the Jewish people, but on the contrary,
taking the first step on the road to autonomous national activity, taking a first
step towards renewal and rebirth of the nation. It was necessary to assimilate
what was foreign to us in order to be able to develop with new energy what was
our own. But half a century later, many radical transformations took place both
inside and outside the Jewish world. The desire to appropriate universal
knowledge has become widespread as never before. And it is then, now, that
must be inculcated to the younger generations the Jewish principles. It is now
that there is a threat of an irremediable dilution in the foreign environment:
There is no day that passes in which our sons do not leave us and do not
become strangers to us; enlightened by the Enlightenment, our children serve
all the peoples of the Earth, except ours; no one is there to work for the Jewish
cause. The world around us is too magnificent, too spacious and too rich
we cannot admit that it diverts Jewish youth from the ugliness of the daily
existence of the Jews The deepening of national values of Jewishness must
become the main axis of Jewish education.Only the bond of solidarity
allows a nation to hold (we ourselves would need it!A. S.), while denial
slows down the struggle for the right of the Jews: one imagines that there is a
way out, and we leave lately in compact masses, with lightness and
cynicism.1468
Then, letting himself be carried away: The royal spirit [of Israel] in all its
power, its tragic history in all its grandiose magnificence Who are we to
justify ourselves before them? Who are they to demand accountability?1469

1466Ibidem, pp. 26, 30, 75, 172173, 195, 199200, 205.

1467Ibidem, pp. 15, 17, 69.
1468Ibidem, pp. 1824, 175177.
1469Ibidem, pp. 14, 200.
 The latter formula, we can also respect it fully. But under the condition of
reciprocity. Especially since it is not up to any nation or religion to judge
another.
The calls to return to Jewish roots did not remain unheeded in those years.
In Saint Petersburg, before the revolution, we could note in the circles of the
RussoJewish intelligentsia a very great interest in Jewish history.1470 In 1908,
the Jewish HistoricalEthnographic Commission expanded into a Jewish
HistoricalEthnographic Society,1471 headed by M. Winaver. It worked actively
and efficiently to collect the archives on the history and ethnography of the Jews
of Russia and Polandnothing comparable was established by Jewish historical
science in the West. The magazine The Jewish Past, led by S. Dubnov, then was
created.1472 At the same time began the publication of the Jewish Encyclopdia
in sixteen volumes (which we use extensively in this study), and the History of
the Jewish People in fifteen volumes. It is true that in the last volume of the
Jewish Encyclopdia, its editors complain that the elite of the Jewish
intelligentsia has shown its indifference to the cultural issues raised by this
Encyclopdia, devoting itself exclusively to the struggle for the equalityall
formalof rights for the Jews.1473
Meanwhile, on the contrary, in other minds and other Jewish hearts there
was a growing conviction that the future of the Jews of Russia was indissolubly
linked to that of Russia. Although scattered over an immense territory and
among a foreign world, the Russian Jewish community had and was
conscious of being a unique whole. Because unique was the environment that
surrounded us, unique its culture This unique culture, we absorbed it
throughout the whole country.1474
The Jews of Russia have always been able to align their own interests to
those of all the Russian people. And this did not come from any nobility of
character or a sense of gratitude, but from a perception of historical realities.
Open controversy with Jabotinsky: Russia is not, for the millions of Jews who
populate it, a step among others on the historical path of the wandering Jew
The contribution of Russian Jews to the international Jewish community has
been and will be the most significant. There is no salvation for us without
Russia, as there is no salvation for Russia without us.1475
This interdependence is affirmed even more categorically by the deputy of
the second and third Dumas, O. I. Pergament: No improvement of the internal

1470Pamiati, M. L. Vichnitsera, BJWR-1. p. 8.

1471JE, t. 8, p. 466.
1472JE, t. 7, pp. 449450.
1473JE, t. 16, p. 276.
1474I. M. Bikerman, Rossia i rousskoye ievreisstvo (Russia and the Jewish Community of
Russia), RaJ. p. 86.
1475St. Ivanovich, Ievrei i sovetskaya dikiatoura (The Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship), in JW,
pp. 5556.
situation of Russia is possible without the simultaneous enfranchisement of the
Jews from the yoke of inequality.1476
And there, one cannot ignore the exceptional personality of the jurist G. B.
Sliosberg: among the Jews he was one of those who, for decades, had the
closest relations with the Russian State, sometimes as Deputy to the Principal
Secretary of the Senate, sometimes as a consultant to the Ministry of the
Interior, but to whom many Jews reproached his habit of asking the authorities
for rights for the Jews, when the time had come demand them. He writes in his
memoirs: From childhood, I have become accustomed to consider myself
above all as a Jew. But from the beginning of my conscious life I also felt like a
son of Russia Being a good Jew does not mean that one is not a good Russian
citizen.1477In our work, we were not obliged to overcome the obstacles
encountered at every step by the Jews of Poland because of the Polish
authorities In the Russian political and administrative system, we Jews did
not represent a foreign element, insofar as, in Russia, cohabited many
nationalities. The cultural interests of Russia did not conflict in any way with
the cultural interests of the Jewish community. These two cultures were
somewhat complementary.1478 He even added this somewhat humorous remark:
the legislation on Jews was so confusing and contradictory that in the 90s, it
was necessary to create a specific jurisprudence for the Jews using purely
Talmudic methods.1479
And again, in a higher register: The easing of the national yoke which has
been felt in recent years, shortly before Russia entered a tragic period in its
history, bore in the hearts of all Russian Jews the hope that the Russian Jewish
consciousness would gradually take a creative path, that of reconciling the
Jewish and Russian aspects in the synthesis of a higher unity.1480
And can we forget that, among the seven authors of the incomparable
Milestones1481, three were Jews: M. O. Gershenzon, A. S. IzgoevLande, and S.
L. Frank?
But there was reciprocity: in the decades preceding the revolution, the Jews
benefited from the massive and unanimous support of progressive circles.
Perhaps the amplitude of this support is due to a context of bullying and
pogroms, but it has never been so complete in any other country (and perhaps
never in all the past centuries). Our intelligentsia was so generous, so freedom
loving, that it ostracised antiSemitism from society and humanity; moreover,
the one who did not give his frank and massive support to the struggle for equal
rights of the Jews, who did not make it a priority, was considered a despicable
antiSemite. With its everawakening moral consciousness and extreme

1476JE, t. 12, pp. 372373.

1477Sliosberg, t. 1, pp. 34.
1478Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 302.
1479Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 302.
1480Linsky, RaJ, p. 144.
1481Vekhi: resounding collection of articles (1909) in which a group of intellectuals
disillusioned from Marxism invited the intelligentsia to reconcile with the power.
sensitivity, the Russian intelligentsia sought to understand and assimilate the
Jewish view of priorities affecting the whole of political life: is deemed
progressive all that is a reaction against the persecution of the Jews, all the rest
is reactionary. Not only did Russian society firmly defend the Jews against the
government, but it forbade itself and forbade anyone to show any trace of a
shadow of criticism of the conduct of each Jew in particular: and if this bore
antiSemitism within me? (The generation formed at that time retained these
principles for decades.)
V. A. Maklakov evokes in his memoirs a significant episode that occurred
during the congress of the Zemstvos in 1905, when the wave of pogroms
against the Jews and intellectuals had just swept through and began to rise in
strength the pogroms directed against landowners. E. V. de Roberti proposed
not to extend the amnesty [demanded by the congress] to the crimes related to
violence against children and women. He was immediately suspected of
wanting to introduce a class amendment, that is to say, to concern himself
with the families of the noble victims of pogroms. E. de Roberti hastened to
reassure everybody: I had absolutely no plan in regard to the property of the
noblemen Five or twenty properties burned down, this has no importance. I
have in view the mass of immovable property and houses belonging to Jews,
which were burned and pillaged by the Black Hundreds.1482
During the terror of 19051907, Gerzenstein (who had been ironic about
the property fires of the noblemen) and Iollos were considered as martyrs, but
no one among the thousands of other innocent victims, were considered so. In
The Last Autocrat, a satirical publication that the Russian liberals published
abroad, they succeeded in placing the following legend under the portrait of the
general whom the terrorist Hirsch Lekkert had attempted in vain to assassinate:
Because of him[I emphasiseA. S.], the tsar had executed the Jew
Lekkert.1483
It was not just the parties of the opposition, it was the whole mass of
middleclass civil servants who were trembling at the idea of sounding like
nonprogressives. It was necessary to enjoy a good personal fortune, or
possess remarkable freedom of mind, to resist with courage the pressure of
general opinion. As for the world of the bar, of art, of science, ostracism
immediately struck anyone who moved away from this magnetic field.
Only Leo Tolstoy, who enjoyed a unique position in society, could afford to
say that, for him, the Jewish question was in the 81st place.
The Jewish Encyclopdia complained that the pogroms of October 1905
provoked in the progressive intelligentsia a protestation that was not specific

1482V. A. Maklakov, Vlast i obchtchestvennost na zakate staro Rossii (Vospominania

sovremennika) [The power and opinion during the twilight of ancient Russia (Memoirs of a
Contemporary)], Paris: Prilojenie k Illioustrirovanno Rossii II n 1936, p. 466.
1483Der Letzte russische Alleinherscher (The Last Autocrat: Study on the Life and Reign of the
Emperor of Russia Nicholas II), Berlin, Ebcrhard Frowein Verlag [1913], p. 58.
[i.e., exclusively Jewishcentred], but general, oriented towards all
manifestations of the counterrevolution in all its forms.1484
Moreover, Russian society would have ceased to be itself if it had not
brought everything to a single burning question: tsarism, still tsarism, always
tsarism!
But the consequence was this: After the days of October [the pogroms of
1905], concrete aid to the Jewish victims was brought only by the Jews of
Russia and other countries.1485 And Berdyaev added: Are you capable of
feeling the soul of the Jewish people? No, you are fighting in favour of an
abstract humanity.1486
This is confirmed by Sliosberg: In politically evolved circles, the Jewish
question was not political in the broad sense of the term. Society was attentive
to manifestations of the reaction in all its forms.1487
In order to correct this misjudgement of Russian society, a collection of
articles entitled Shchit [The Shield] was published in 1915: it took on globally
and exclusively the defence of the Jews, but without the participation of the
latter as writers, these were either Russian or Ukrainian, and a beautiful skewer
of celebrities of the time was assembled therenearly forty names. 1488 The
whole collection was based on a single theme: Jews in Russia; it is univocal
in its conclusions and its formulations denote in some places a certain spirit of
sacrifice.
A few samplesL. Andreev: The prospect of an approaching solution to
the Jewish problem brings about a feeling of joy close to fervour, the feeling
of being freed from a pain that has accompanied me all my life, which was like
a hump on the back; I breathed poisonous airM. Gorky: The great
European thinkers consider that the psychic structure of the Jew is culturally
higher, more beautiful than that of the Russian. (He then rejoiced at the
development in Russia of the sect of the Sabbatists and that of the New
Israel.)P. Maliantovitch: The arbitrariness to which the Jews are subjected
is a reproach which, like a stain, covers the name of the Russian people The
best among the Russians feel it as a shame that pursues you all your life. We are
barbarians among the civilised peoples of humanity we are deprived of the
precious right to be proud of our people The struggle for the equal rights of
the Jews represents for the Russian man a national cause of prime
importance The arbitrariness subjected to the Jews condemns the Russians to
failure in their attempts to attain their own happiness. If we do not worry about
the liberation of the Jews, we will never be able to solve our own problems.
K. Arseniev: If we remove everything that hinders the Jews, we will see an
increase in the intellectual forces of Russia.A. Kalmykova: On the one
1484JE, t. 12, p. 621.
1485JE, t. 12, p. 621.
1486Nikolai Berdyaev, Filosofia neravenstva (Philosophy of Inequality), 2nd ed., Paris, YMCA
Press, 1970, p. 72.
1487Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 260.
1488Shchit (the Shield), 1916.
hand, our close spiritual relationship with the Jewish world in the domain of
the highest spiritual values; on the other, the Jews may be the object of
contempt, of hatred.L. Andreev: It is we, the Russians, who are the Jews of
Europe; our border, it is precisely the Pale of Settlement.D. Merezhkovsky:
What do the Jews expect of us? Our moral indignation? But this indignation is
so strong and so simple that we only have to scream with the Jews. This is
what we do.By the effect of I am not sure which misunderstanding,
Berdyaev is not one of the authors of the Shield. But he said of himself that he
had broken with his milieu from his earliest youth and that he preferred to
frequent the Jews.
All the authors of the Shield define antiSemitism as an ignoble feeling, as
a disease of consciousness, obstinate and contagious (D. Ovsianikov
Kulikovsky, Academician). But at the same time, several authors note that the
methods and processes of antiSemites [Russians] are of foreign origin (P.
Milyukov). The latest cry of antiSemitic ideology is a product of the German
industry of the spirit The Aryan theory has been taken up by our
nationalist press Menshikov1489 [copies] the ideas of Gobineau (F.
Kokochkin). The doctrine of the superiority of the Aryans in relation to the
Semites is of German manufacture (see Ivanov).
But for us, with our hump on our backs, what does it change? Invited by
the Progressive Circle at the end of 1916, Gorky devoted the two hours of
his lecture to rolling the Russian people in the mud and raising the Jews to the
skies, as noted by the Progressive deputy Mansyrev, one of the founders of the
Circle.1490
A contemporary Jewish writer analyses this phenomenon objectively and
lucidly: We assisted to a profound transformation of the minds of the
cultivated Russians who, unfortunately, took to heart the Jewish problem much
more greatly than might have been expected Compassion for the Jews was
transformed into an imperative almost as categorical as the formula God, the
Tsar, the Fatherland; as for the Jews, they took advantage of this profession
of faith according to their degree of cynicism. 1491 At the same time, Rozanov
spoke of the avid desire of the Jews to seize everything.1492
In the 20s, V. Choulguine summed it up as follows: At that time [a quarter
of a century before the revolution], the Jews had taken control of the political
life of the country The brain of the nation (if we except the government and
the circles close to it) found itself in the hands of the Jews and was accustomed

1489Menshikov Michel (18591918), began a career as a sailor (until 1892), then became a
journalist at the New Times, supported Stolypin. After October, takes refuge in Valdai.
Arrested in August 1918 by the Bolsheviks, he was executed without trial.
1490Kn. S. P. Mansyrev, Moi vospominania (My memories) // [Sb.] Fevralskaa revolioutsia /
sost. S. A. Alexeyev. M. L., 1926, p. 259.
1491A. Voronel, in 22: Obchtchestvennopolititcheski i literatourny newspaper Ivreiskoi
intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izrailie, Tel Aviv, 1986, no. 50, pp. 156157.
1492Perepiska V. V. Rozanova and M. O. Gerchenzona (Correspondence of V. Rozanov and M.
Gerchenzon), Novy Mir, 1991, no. 3, p. 239.
to think according to their directives. Despite all the restrictions on their
rights, the Jews had taken possession of the soul of the Russian people.1493
But was it the Jews who had seized the Russian soul or did the Russians
simply not know what to do with it?
Still in the Shield, Merezhkovsky tried to explain that philoSemitism had
arisen in reaction to antiSemitism, that the blind valourisation of a foreign
nationality was asserted, that the absolutisation of the no led to that of the
yes.1494 And Professor Baudouin de Courtenay acknowledged that many,
even among the political friends of the Jews, experience repulsion and
acknowledge it in private. Here, of course, there is nothing to do. Sympathy and
antipathy are not commanded. We must nevertheless rely not on affects, but
on reason.1495
The confusion that reigned in the minds of those days was brought to light
with greater significance and reach by P. B. Struve, who devoted his entire life
to breaking down the obstacles erected on the path that would lead him from
Marxism to the rule of law, and, along the way, also obstacles of other kinds.
The occasion was a polemicfallen into a deep oblivion, but of great historical
importancewhich broke out in the liberal Slovo newspaper in March 1909 and
immediately won the entirety of the Russian press.
Everything had begun with the Chirikov affair, an episode whose
importance was inflated to the extreme: an explosion of rage in a small literary
circle accusing Chirikovauthor of a play entitled The Jews, and well disposed
towards themto be antiSemitic. (And this because at a dinner of writers he
had let himself go on to say that most of the literary critics of Saint Petersburg
were Jews, but were they able to understand the reality of Russian life?) This
affair shook many things in Russian society. (The journalist Lioubosh wrote
about it: It is the two kopeck candle that set fire to Moscow.)
Considering that he had not sufficiently expressed himself on the Chrikov
affair in a first article, Jabotinsky published a text entitled Asemitism in the
Slovo newspaper on 9 March 1909. He stated in it his fears and his indignation
at the fact that the majority of the progressive press wanted to silence this
matter. That even a great liberal newspaper (he was referring to the Russian
News) had not published a word for twentyfive years on the atrocious
persecutions suffered by the Jewish people Since then the law of silence has
been regarded as the latest trend by progressive philoSemites. It was precisely
here that evil resided: in passing over the Jewish question. (We can only agree
with this!) When Chirikov and Arabajine assure us that there is nothing anti
Semitic in their remarks, they are both perfectly right. Because of this tradition
of silence, one can be accused of antiSemitism for having only pronounced
the word Jew or made the most innocent remark about some particularity of

1493V. V. Choulguine, Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa: Ob antisemitzme v Rossii (What we

do not like about them On antiSemitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, pp. 58, 75.
1494Shchit (the Shield), p. 164.
1495Ibidem, p. 145.
the Jews The problem is that the Jews have become a veritable taboo that
forbids the most trivial criticism, and that it is them that are the big losers in the
affair. (Here again, we can only agree!) There is a feeling that the word Jew
itself has become an indecent term. There is here an echo of a general state of
mind that makes its way among the middle strata of the progressive Russian
intelligentsia We can not yet provide tangible proofs of it, we can only have a
presentiment about this state of mind, but it is precisely this that torments
him: no proofs, just an intuitionand the Jews will not see the storm coming,
they will be caught unprepared. For the moment, we see only a small cloud
forming in the sky and we can hear a distant, but already menacing roll. It is
not antiSemitism, it is only Asemitism, but that also is not admissible,
neutrality cannot be justified: after the pogrom of Kishinev and while the
reactionary press peddles the inflamed tow of hatred, the silence of the
progressive newspapers about one of the most tragic questions of Russian life
is unacceptable.1496
In the editorial of the same issue of Slovo, were formulated the following
reservations about Jabotinskys article: The accusations made by the author
against the progressive press correspond, in our opinion, to the reality of things.
We understand the sentiments that have inspired the author with his bitter
remarks, but to impute to the Russian intelligentsia the intention, so to speak
deliberately, of sweeping the Jewish question under the rug, is unfair. The
Russian reality has so many unresolved problems that we cannot devote much
space to each one of them Yet, if many of these problems are resolved, this
will have very important effects, including for the Jews who are citizens of our
common homeland.1497
And if the editorialist of the Slovo had then asked Jabotinsky why he did
not defend one or the other of those fools who uttered the most innocent
remark about some particularity of the Jews? Was Jewish opinion interested
only in them, did they take their part? Or was it enough to observe how the
Russian intelligentsia got rid of these antiSemites? No, the Jews were no less
responsible than the others for this taboo.
Another article in the same paper helped launch the discussion: The
agreement, not the fusion, of V. Golubev. Indeed, the Chirikov affair is far
from being an isolated case, at the present time the national question is
also of concern to our intelligentsia. In the recent past, especially in the year of
the revolution1498, our intelligentsia has sinned very much by
cosmopolitanism. But the struggles that have been fought within our
community and between the nationalities that populate the Russian State have
not disappeared without leaving traces. Like the other nationalities, in those
years, the Russians had to look at their own national question; when

1496Vl. Jabotinsky, Asemitizm (Asemitism), in Slovo, SPb., 1909, 9 (22) March, p. 2; See also:
[Sb.] Felietony, pp. 7783.
1497Slovo, 1909, 9 (22) March, p. 1.
1498of 1905.
nationalities deprived of sovereignty began to selfdetermine, the Russians felt
the need to do so as well. Even the history of Russia, we Russian
intellectuals, we know it perhaps less well than European history. Universal
ideals have always been more important to us than the edification of our own
country. But, even according to Vladimir Solovyov, who is however very far
removed from nationalism, before being a bearer of universal ideals, it is
essential to raise oneself to a certain national level. And the feeling of raising
oneself seems to have begun to make its way into our intelligentsia. Until now,
we have been silent on our own peculiarities. Remembering them in our
memory does not constitute a manifestation of antiSemitism and oppression of
other nationalities: between nationalities there must be harmony and not
fusion.1499
The editorial team of the newspaper may have taken all these precautions
because it was preparing to publish the following day, 10 March, an article by P.
B. Struve, The intelligentsia and the national face, which had coincidentally
arrived at the same time than that of Jabotinsky and also dealing with the
Chirikov case.
Struve wrote: This incident, which will soon be forgotten, has shown
that something has moved in the minds, has awakened and will no longer be
calmed. And we will have to rely on that. The Russian intelligentsia hides its
national face, it is an attitude that imposes nothing, which is
sterile.Nationality is something much more obvious [than race, colour of
skin] and, at the same time, something subtle. It is the attraction and repulsion
of the mind and, to become aware of them, it is not necessary to resort to
anthropometry or to genealogy. They live and palpitate in the depths of the
soul. One can and must fight to make these attractions/repulsions not be
brought into law, but political equity does not require from us national
indifference. These attractions and repulsions belong to us, they are our
goods, the organic feeling of our national belonging And I do not see the
slightest reason to renounce this property in the name of anyone or anything.
Yes, insists Struve, it is essential to draw a border between the legal, the
political domains and the realm where these sentiments live. Especially with
regard to the Jewish question, it is both very easy and very difficult.The
Jewish question is formally a question of law, and, for this reason, it is easy
and natural to help solve it: to grant the Jews equal rightsyes, of course! But
at the same time it is very difficult because the force of rejection towards the
Jews in different strata of Russian society is considerable, and it requires great
moral force and a very rational mind to, despite this repulsion, resolve
definitively this question of right. However, even though there is a great force
of rejection towards the Jews among large segments of the Russian population,
of all the foreigners the Jews are those who are closest to us, those who are the
most closely linked to us. It is a historicocultural paradox, but it is so. The
Russian intelligentsia has always regarded the Jews as Russians, and it is neither
1499V. Golubev, Soglachenie, a ne stianie, Slovo, 1909, 9 (22) March, p. 1.
fortuitous nor the effect of a misunderstanding. The deliberate initiative of
rejecting Russian culture and asserting Jewish national singularity does not
belong to the Russian intelligentsia, but to this movement known as Zionism
I do not feel any sympathy for Zionism, but I understand that the problem of
Jewish nationality does indeed exist, and even poses itself more and more. (It
is significant that he places national and Jewish in quotation marks: he still
cannot believe that the Jews think of themselves as others.) There does not
exist in Russia other foreigners who play a role as important in Russian
culture And here is another difficulty: they play this role while remaining
Jews. One cannot, for example, deny the role of the Germans in Russian
culture and science; but by immersing themselves in Russian culture, the
Germans completely blend into it. With the Jews, thats another matter!
And he concludes: We must not deceive [our national feeling] or hide our
faces I have a right, like any Russian, to these feelings The better it is
understood the less there will be misunderstandings in the future.1500
Yes Oh, if we had woken up, as much as we are, a few decades earlier!
(The Jews, they, had awakened long before the Russians.)
But the very next day, it was a whirlwind: as if all the newspapers had
waited for that! From the liberal Hacha Gazeta (Is this the right moment to talk
about this?) and the rightwing newspaper Novoie Vremia to the organ of the
Democratic constitutional party Retch where Milyukov could not help
exclaiming: Jabotinsky has succeeded in breaking the wall of silence, and all
the frightening and threatening things that the progressive press and the
intelligentsia had sought to hide from the Jews now appear in their true
dimension. But, later on, argumentative and cold as usual, Milyukov goes on to
the verdict. It begins with an important warning: Where does it lead? Who
benefits from it? The national face which, moreover, we must not hide, is a
step towards the worst of fanaticism! (Thus, the national face must be
hidden.) Thus the slippery slope of sthetic nationalism will precipitate the
intelligentsia towards its degeneration, towards a true tribal chauvinism
engendered in the putrid atmosphere of the reaction reigning over todays
society.1501
But P. B. Struve, with an almost juvenile agility in spite of his forty years,
retaliates as soon as 12 March in the columns of the Slovo to the professorial
speech of Milyukov. And, above all, to this sleight of hand: Where does it
lead? (Who benefits from it? Who will draw the chestnuts from the
fire?this is how people will be silencedwhatever they sayfor a hundred
years or more. There is a falsifying process that denotes a total inability to
understand that a speech can be honest and have weight in itself.)Our point
of view is not refuted on the merits, but confronted on the polemic mode to a

1500P. Struve, Intelligentsia i natsionalnoe litso, Slovo, 1909, 10 (23) March, p. 2.

1501P. Milyukov, Natsionalizm protiv natsionalizma (Nationalism Against Nationalism), Retch,
19O9, 11 (24) March, p. 2.
projection: Where does it lead?1502 (A few days later, he wrote again in the
Slovo: It is an old process to discredit both an idea that one does not share and
the one who formulates it, insinuating perfidiously that the people of Novoie
Vremia or Russkoye Znamya will find it quite to their liking. This procedure is,
in our opinion, utterly unworthy of a progressive press. 1503) Then, as to the
substance: National questions are, nowadays, associated with powerful,
sometimes violent feelings. To the extent that they express in everyone the
consciousness of their national identity, these feelings are fully legitimate and
to stifle them is a great villainy. That is it: if they are repressed, they will
reappear in a denatured form. As for this Asemitism which would be the
worst thing, it is in fact a much more favourable ground for a legal solution of
the Jewish question than the endless struggle between antiSemitism and
philoSemitism. There is no nonRussian nationality that needs all Russians
to love it without reservation. Even less that they pretend to love it. In truth,
Asemitism, combined with a clear and lucid conception of certain moral and
political principles and certain political constraints, is much more necessary and
useful to our Jewish compatriots than a sentimental and soft philoSemitism,
especially if this one is simulated.And it is good that the Jews see the
national face of Russian constitutionalism and democratic society. And it is
of no use to them to speak under the delusion that this face belongs only to anti
Semitic fanaticism. This is not the head of the Medusa, but the honest and
human face of the Russian nation, without which the Russian State would not
stand up.1504And again these lines of Slovos editorial team: Harmony
implies recognition and respect for all the specificities of each [nationality].1505
Heated debates continued in the newspapers. Within a few days a whole
literature was formed on the subject. We assisted In the Progressive Press
to something unthinkable even a short time ago: there is a debate on the
question of GreatRussian nationalism!1506 But the discussion only reached this
level in the Slovo; the other papers concentrated on the question of attractions
and repulsions.1507 The intelligentsia turned its anger towards its hero of the
day before.
Jabotinsky also gave voice, and even twice The bear came out of his
lair, he lashed out, addressed to P. Struve, a man who was however so calm
and wellbalanced. Jabotinsky, on the other hand, felt offended; he described his
article, as well as that of Milyukov, as a famous batch: their languorous
declamation is impregnated with hypocrisy, insincerity, cowardice and

1502P. Struve, Polemitcheskie zigzagui i nesvoevremennaya pravda (polemical zigzags and

undesired truth), Slovo, 1909, 12 (25) March, p. 1.
1503Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1.
1504P. Struve, Slovo, 1909, 12 (25) March, p. 1.
1505V. Golubev, K polemike o natsionalizme (On the controversy regarding nationalism),
ibidem, p. 2.
1506M. Slavinski, Ruskie, velikorossy i rossiane (The Russians, the Great Russians, and the
citizens of Russia), ibidem, 14 (27) March, p. 2.
1507Slovo*, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1.
opportunism, which is why it is so incorrigibly worthless; and to ironise in
quoting Milyukov: thus the holy and pure Russian intelligentsia of old felt
feelings of repulsion at the encounter of the Jews? Bizarre, no? He
criticised the holy and pure climate of this marvellous country, and the
zoological species of Yursus judaeophagus intellectualis. (The conciliatory
Winaver also took for his rank: the Jewish footman of the Russian palace).
Jabotinsky fulminated at the idea that the Jews should wait until was resolved
the central political problem (i.e. the tsars deposition): We thank you for
having such a flattering opinion on our disposition to behave like a dog with his
master, on the celerity of faithful Israel. He even concluded by stating that
never before the exploitation of a people by another had ever been revealed
with such ingenuous cynicism.1508
It must be admitted that this excessive virulence hardly contributed to the
victory of his cause. Moreover, the near future was going to show that it was
precisely the deposition of the tsar which would open the Jews to even more
possibilities than they sought to obtain, and cut the grass under the foot of
Zionism in Russia; so much and so well that Jabotinsky was also deceived on
the merits.
Much later and with the retreat of time, another witness of that era, then a
member of the Bund, recalled that in the years 19071914, some liberal
intellectuals were affected by the epidemic, if not of open antiSemitism, at
least Asemitism that struck Russia then; on the other hand, having gotten over
the extremist tendencies that had arisen during the first Russian revolution, they
were tempted to hold the Jews accountable, whose participation in the
revolution had been blatant. In the years leading up to the war, the rise of
Russian nationalism was present in certain circles where, at first sight, the
Jewish problem was, only a short time before, perceived as a Russian
problem.1509
In 1912, Jabotinsky himself, this time in a more balanced tone, reported
this judicious observation of a prominent Jewish journalist: as soon as the Jews
are interested in some cultural activity, immediately the latter becomes foreign
to the Russian public, who is no longer attracted to it. A kind of invisible
rejection. It is true, that a national demarcation cannot be avoided; it will be
necessary to organise life in Russia without external additions which, in so
large a quantity, perhaps cannot be tolerated [by the Russians].1510
To consider all that has been presented above, the most accurate conclusion
is to say that within the Russian intelligentsia were developing simultaneously
(as history offers many examples) two processes that, with regard to the Jewish
problem, were distinguished by a question of temperament, not by a degree of
sympathy. But the one represented by Struve was too weak, uncertain, and was
1508Vl. Jabotinsky, Medved iz berloguiSb. Felietony, pp. 8790.
1509G. I. Aronson, V borbe za grajdanskie i natsionalnye prava Obchtchestvennye tetchenia v
rousskom ievrestve (The fight for civil and national rights currents of opinion in the Jewish
community of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 229, 572.
1510Vl. Jabotinsky[Sb.] Felietony, pp. 245247.
stifled. Whilst the one who had trumpeted his philoSemitism in the collection
The Shield enjoyed a wide publicity and prevailed among public opinion. There
is only to regret that Jabotinsky did not recognise Struves point of view at its
fair value.
As for the 1909 debate in the Slovo columns, it was not limited to the
Jewish question, but turned into a discussion of Russian national consciousness,
which, after the eighty years of silence that followed, remains today still
vivacious and instructive,P. Struve wrote: Just as we must not Russify those
who do not want it, so we must not dissolve ourselves in Russian
multinationalism.1511V. Golubev protested against the monopolisation of
patriotism and nationalism by reactionary groups: We have lost sight of the
fact that the victories won by the Japanese have had a disastrous effect on the
popular conscience and national sentiment. Our defeat not only humiliated our
bureaucrats, as public opinion hoped, but, indirectly, the nation as well. (Oh
no, not indirectly: quite directly!) Russian nationality has vanished.1512
Nor is it a joke that the flourishing of the word Russian itself, which has been
transformed into authentically Russian. The progressive intelligentsia has let
these two notions go, abandoning them to the people of the right. Patriotism,
we could only conceive it in quotation marks. But we must compete with
reactionary patriotism with a popular patriotism We have frozen in our
refusal of the patriotism of the Black Hundreds, and if we have opposed
something of it, it is not another conception of patriotism, but of universal
ideals.1513 And yet, all our cosmopolitanism has not allowed us, until today, to
fraternise with the Polish society1514
A. Pogodin was able to say that after V. Solovyovs violent indictment of
Danilevskys book, Russia and Europe, after Gradovskys articles, were the
first manifestations of this consciousness which, like the instinct of self
preservation, awakens among the peoples when danger threatens them.
(Coincidentallyat the very moment when this polemic took place, Russia had
to endure its national humiliation: it was forced to recognise with pitiable
resignation the annexation by Austria of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was
equivalent to a diplomatic TsouShina.) Fatality leads us to raise this
question, which was formerly entirely foreign to the Russian intelligentsia, but
which life itself imposes on us with a brutality that forbids all evasion.1515
In conclusion, the Slovo wrote: A fortuitous incident triggered quite a
journalistic storm. This means that Russian society needs national
awareness. In the past, it had turned away not only from a false antinational

1511P. Struve, Slovo, 1909, 10 (23) March, p. 2.

1512V. Golubev, ibidem, 12 (25) March, p. 2.
1513V. Golubev, O monopolii na patriotizm (On the monopoly of patriotism), ibidem, 14 (27)
March, p. 2.
1514V. Golubev, Ot samuvajenia k ouvajeniou (From selfrespect to respect), ibidem, 25 March
(7 April), p. 1.
1515A. Pogodin, K voprosou o natsionalizme (On the national question), ibidem, 15 (28)
March, p. 1.
policy but also from genuine nationalism without which a policy cannot
really be built. A people capable of creation cannot but have its own face. 1516
Minine1517 was certainly a nationalist. A constructive nationalist, possessing
the sense of the State, is peculiar to living nations, and that is what we need
now.1518 Just as three hundred years ago, history tells us to reply, to say, in the
dark hours of trial if we have the right, like any people worthy of the name, to
exist by ourselves.1519
And yeteven if, apparently, the year 1909 was rather peacefulone felt
that the Storm was in the air!
However, certain things were not lost sight of (M. Slavinski): Attempts to
Russify or, more exactly, to impose the RussianRussian model on Russia
have had a disastrous effect on living national peculiarities, not only of all the
nonsovereign peoples of the Empire, but also and above all of the people of
GreatRussia The cultural forces of the people of Great Russia proved
insufficient for this. For the nationality of Great Russia, only the development
of the interior, a normal circulation of blood, is good. 1520 (Alas! even today, the
lesson has not been assimilated). Necessary is the struggle against
physiological nationalism, [when] a stronger people tries to impose on others
who are less so a way of life that is foreign to them. 1521 But an empire as this
could not have been constituted solely by physical force, there was also a
moral force. And if we possess this force, then the equality of rights of other
peoples (Jews as well as Poles) does not threaten us in any way.1522
In the nineteenth century already, and a fortiori at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the Russian intelligentsia felt that it was at a high level of
global consciousness, universality, cosmopolitanism or internationality (at the
time, little difference was made between all these notions). In many fields, it
had almost entirely denied what was Russian, national. (From the top of the
tribune of the Duma, one practised at the pun: patriotIscariot.)
As for the Jewish intelligentsia, it did not deny its national identity. Even
the most extreme of Jewish socialists struggled to reconcile their ideology with
national sentiment. At the same time, there was no voice among the Jewsfrom
Dubnov to Jabotinsky, passing by Winaverto say that the Russian
intelligentsia, who supported their persecuted brothers with all their souls,
might not give up his own national feeling. Equity would have required it. But
no one perceived this disparity: under the notion of equality of rights, the Jews
understood something more.
Thus, the Russian intelligentsia, solitary, took the road to the future.

1516Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1.

1517Hero of the Russian resistance to the Polish invasion in the early seventeenth century.
1518A. Pogodin, ibidem, 15 (28) March, p. 1.
1519Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1.
1520M. Slavinski, Slovo, 1909, 14 (27) March, p. 2.
1521A. Pogodin, ibidem, 15 (28) March, p. 1.
1522Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1.
 The Jews did not obtain equal rights under the tsars, butand probably
partly for this very reasonthey obtained the hand and the fidelity of the
Russian intelligentsia. The power of their development, their energy, their talent
penetrated the consciousness of Russian society. The idea we had of our
perspectives, of our interests, the impetus we gave to the search for solutions to
our problems, all this, we incorporated it to the idea that they were getting of it
themselves. We have adopted their vision of our history and how to get out of it.
Understanding this is much more important than calculating the percentage
of Jews who tried to destabilise Russia (all of whom we did), who made the
revolution or participated in Bolshevik power.
 Chapter 12. During the War (19141916)

The First World War was undoubtedly the greatest of the follies of the twentieth
century. With no real motives or purposes, three major European powers
Germany, Russia, AustriaHungaryclashed in a deadly battle which resulted
in the first two not recovering for the duration of the century, and the third
disintegrating. As for the two allies of Russia, seemingly victors, they held out
for another quarter of a century, and then lost their power of domination forever.
Henceforth, the whole of Europe ceased to fulfil its proud mission of guiding
humanity, becoming an object of jealousy and incapable of keeping in its
weakened hands its colonial possessions.
None of the three emperors, and even less Nicholas II and his entourage,
had realised in what war they were plunging, they could imagine neither its
scale nor its violence. Apart from Stolypin and after him, Durnovo, the
authorities had not understood the warning addressed to Russia between 1904
and 1906.
Let us consider this same war with the eyes of the Jews. In these three
neighbouring empires lived threequarters of the Jews of the planet (and 90% of
the Jews of Europe1523) who were on top of that living in the area of future
military operations, of the province of Kovno (then Livonia) up to Austrian
Galicia (then Romania). And the war placed them before an interrogation as
pressing as it was painful: could all, living on the front steps of these three
empires, preserve their imperial patriotism under these conditions? For if, for
the armies that were advancing, behind the front was the enemy, for the Jews
established in these regions, behind the front lived neighbours and co
religionists. They could not want this war: could their mindset shift brutally
towards patriotism? As for the ordinary Jews, those of the Pale of Settlement,
they had even less reason to support the Russian army. We have seen that a
century before, the Jews of western Russia had helped the Russians against
Napoleon. But, in 1914, it was quite different: in the name of what would they
help the Russian army? On behalf of the Pale of Settlement? On the contrary,
did the war not give rise to the hope of a liberation? With the arrival of the
Austrians and the Germans, a new Pale of Settlement was not going to be
established, the numerus clausus would not be maintained in the educational
establishments!

1523SJE, t. 2, 1982, pp. 313314.

 It is precisely in the western part of the Pale of Settlement that the Bund
retained influence, and Lenin tells us that its members are in their majority
Germanophiles and rejoice at the defeat of Russia.1524 We also learn that during
the war, the Jewish autonomist movement Vorwarts adopted an openly pro
German position. Nowadays, a Jewish writer notes finely that, if one reflects
on the meaning of the formula God, the Tsar, the Fatherland, it is
impossible to imagine a Jew, a loyal subject of the Empire, who could have
taken this formula seriously, in other words, in the first degree.1525
But, in the capitals, things were different. Despite their positions of 1904
1905, the influential Jewish circles, like the Russian liberals, offered their
support to the autocratic regime when the conflict broke out; they proposed a
pact. The patriotic fervour which swept Russia did not leave the Jews
aside.1526 It was the time when, seeing the Russian patriotism of the Jews,
Purishkevich1527 embraced the rabbis.1528 As for the press (not Novoie Vremia,
but the liberal press, halfJewish according to Witte, the same one who
expressed and oriented the jolts of public opinion and who, in 1905, literally
demanded the capitulation of power), it was, from the first days of the war,
moved by patriotic enthusiasm. Over the head of little Serbia, the sword is
raised against Great Russia, the guarantor of the inalienable right of millions of
people to work and to life! At an extraordinary meeting of the Duma, the
representatives of the different nationalities and different parties were all, on
this historic day, inhabited by the same thought, a single emotion made all the
voices tremble That no one lay a hand on Saint Russia! We are ready for all
sacrifices to defend the honour and dignity of Russia, one and indivisible
God, the Tsar, the peopleand victory is assured We, Jews, defend our
country because we are deeply attached to it.
Even if, behind this, there was a wellfounded calculation, the expectation
of a gesture of recognition in returnthe attainment of equal rights, even if it
was only once the war was over, the government had to, by accepting this
unexpected ally, decide to assumeor promise to assumeits share of
obligations.
And, in fact, did the achievement of equal rights necessarily have to come
through the revolution? Moreover, the crushing of the insurrection by Stolypin
had led to a decline in interest in politics in Russian as well as Jewish
circles,1529which, at the very least, meant that there was a move away from

1524V. I. Lenin, Complete Works in 55 volumes [in Russian], 19581965, t. 49, p. 64.
1525A. Voronel, 22, Tel Aviv, 1986, no. 50, p. 155.
1526SJE, t. 7, p. 356.
1527Vladimir Purishkevich (18701920), monarchist, opponent of Rasputin, the assassination
of whom he participated in. Arrested in 1917, then given amnesty, he participated in the
White movement and died of typhus in Novorossiysh.
1528D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaya revoliutsia i ievreisstvo (Bolchevizm i Ioudaizm) (The Russian
Revolution and the Jews [Bolshevism and Judaism]), Paris, 1923, p. 143.
1529SJE, t. 7, p, 356.
the revolution. As Chulguine1530 declared: Combating the Jews and the
Germans simultaneously was above the forces of power in Russia, it was
necessary to conclude a pact with somebody.1531 This new alliance with the
Jews had to be formalised: it was necessary to produce at least a document
containing promises, as had been done for the Poles. But only Stolypin would
have had the intelligence and the courage to do so. Without him, there was no
one to understand the situation and take the appropriate decisions. (And, from
the spring of 1915, even more serious mistakes were made.)
The liberal circles, including the elite of the Jewish community, also had in
view another consideration that they took for a certainty. From the year 1907
(again, without urgent necessity), Nicholas II had allowed himself to be dragged
into a military alliance with England (thus putting around his neck the rope of
the subsequent confrontation with Germany). And, now, all the progressive
circles in Russia were making the following analysis: the alliance with the
democratic powers and the common victory with them would inevitably lead to
a global democratisation of Russia at the end of the war and, consequently, the
definitive establishment of equal rights for the Jews. There was, therefore, a
sense for the Jews of Russia, and not only for those who lived in Petersburg and
Moscow, to aspire to the victory of Russia in this war.
But these considerations were counterbalanced by the precipitated, massive
expulsion of the Jews from the area of the front, ordered by the General Staff at
the time of the great retreat of 1915. That the latter had the power to do so was
the result of illconsidered decisions taken at the beginning of the war. In July
1914, in the heat of the action, in the agitation which reigned in the face of the
imminence of conflict, the Emperor had signed without reflection, as a
document of secondary importance, the provisional Regulation of the field
service which gave the General Staff unlimited power over all the neighbouring
regions of the front, with a very wide territorial extension, and this, without any
consultation with the Council of Ministers. At the time, no one had attached any
importance to this document, because all were convinced that the Supreme
Command would always be assured by the Emperor and that there could be no
conflict with the Cabinet. But, as early as July 1914, the Emperor was
persuaded not to assume the Supreme Command of the armies. As a wise man,
the latter proposed the post to his favourite, the fine speaker Sukhomlinov, then
Minister of Defence, who naturally declined this honour. It was the great prince
Nicholas Nicolaevich who was appointed, and the latter did not consider it
possible to begin by upsetting the composition of the General Staff, at the head
of which was General Yanushkevich. But, at the same time, the provisional
regulations were not altered, so that the administration of a third of Russia was
1530Basile Choulguine (18781976), leader of the right wing of the Duma with whom he
breaks at the time of the Beilis affair. Participates in the Progressive Bloc. Collects with
Guchkov the abdication of Nicholas II. Immigrated to Yugoslavia until 1944, he was
captured there and spent twelve years in camps. Dies almost centenary.
1531V. V. Choulguine, Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa Ob Antisemitism v rossii (What we do
not like about them On antiSemitism in Russia), Paris. 1929, p. 67.
in the hands of Yanushkevich, an insignificant man who was not even a military
officer by profession.
From the very beginning of the war, orders were given locally for the
expulsion of the Jews from the army areas.1532 In August 1914, the newspapers
read: The rights of the Jews Telegraphic instruction to all the governors of
provinces and cities to stop the acts of mass or individual expulsion of Jews.
But, from the beginning of 1915, as testified the doctor D. Pasmanik, a medic
on the front during the war, suddenly, throughout the area of the front and in all
circles close to power, spread the rumour that the Jews were doing
espionage.1533
During the summer of 1915, Yanukhovichprecisely himtried to mask
the retreat of the Russian armies, which at that time seemed appalling, by
ordering the mass deportation of the Jews from the front area, arbitrary
deportation, without any examination of individual cases. It was so easy: to
blame all the defeats on the Jews!
These accusations may not have come about without the help of the
German General Staff, which issued a proclamation calling on the Jews of
Russia to rise up against their government. But opinion, supported by many
sources, prevails that in this case it was Polish influence that was at work. As
Sliosberg wrote, just before the war, there had been a brutal explosion of anti
Semitism, a campaign against Jewish domination in industry and commerce
When war broke out, it was at its zenith and the Poles endeavoured by all
means to tarnish the image of the Jewish populations in the eyes of the Supreme
Command by spreading all sorts of nonsense and legends about Jewish
espionage.1534Immediately after the promises made by Nikolai Nikolaevich
in the Appeal to the Poles of 14 August, the latter founded in Warsaw the
Central Committee of the Bourgeoisie, which did not include a single Jew,
whereas in Poland the Jews represented 14% of the population. In September,
there was a pogrom against the Jews in Souvalki. 1535Then, during the retreat
of 1915, the agitation which reigned in the midst of the army facilitated the
spread of the calumnies made up by the Poles.1536 Pasmanik asserts that he is
in a position to prove that the first rumours about the treason of the Jews were
propagated by the Poles, a part of which was actively assisting the Germans.
Seeking to avert suspicion, they hastened to spread the rumour that the Jews
were engaged in espionage.1537 In connection with this expulsion of the Jews,

1532SJE, t. 7, p. 356.
1533Pasmanik, op. cit., p. 144.
1534G. B. Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, pp. 316317.
1535I G. Froumkine, Iz istorii ruskovo ievreistava, [Sb.] Kniga o ruskom evrestve: Ot 1860
godov do Revolutsii 1917 g. (Aspects of the History of Russian Jews), in BJWR, pp. 85
86.
1536Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 324.
1537Pasmanik, op. cit., p. 144.
several sources emphasised the fact that Yanukhevich himself was a Pole
converted to Orthodoxy.1538
He may have undergone this influence, but we consider these explanations
insufficient and in no way justifying the attitude of the Russian General Staff.
Of course, the Jews in the front area could not break their ties with the
neighbouring villages, interrupt the Jewish post, and turn into the enemies of
their coreligionists. Moreover, in the eyes of the Jews in the Pale of Settlement,
the Germans appeared as a European nation of high culture, much different
from the Russians and the Poles (the black shadow of Auschwitz had not yet
covered the earth or crossed the Jewish conscience). At that time, the Times
correspondent, Steven Graham, reported that as soon as the smoke of a German
ship appeared on the horizon, the Jewish population of Libava forgot the
Russian language and began to speak German. If they had to leave, the Jews
preferred to go to the German side.The hostility displayed by the Russian
army, and then their deportation, could only provoke their bitterness and cause
some of them to collaborate openly with the Germans.
In addition to the accusations against the Jews living in these areas, the
Jews were accused of cowardice and desertion. Father Georges Chavelsky,
chaplain of the Russian Army, was attached to the Staff, but often went to the
front and was well informed of all that was going on there; he wrote in his
memoirs: From the first days of the war, it was repeated with insistence that
the Jewish soldiers were cowards and deserters, and local Jews spies and
traitors. There were many examples of Jews who had gone to the enemy or fled;
or Jewish civilians who had given information to the enemy, or, in the course of
their offensives, had delivered to them Russian soldiers and officers who had
lingered on the spot, etc., etc. The more time passed, the more our situation
deteriorated, the more the hatred and the exasperation against the Jews
increased. rumours were spreading from the front to the rear they created a
climate that was becoming dangerous for all Jews in Russia.1539Second
Lieutenant M. Lemke, a Socialist who was then in Staff, recorded, in the
newspaper he was secretly keeping, reports from the southwest Front, in
December 1915; he noted in particular: There is a disturbing increase in the
number of Jewish and Polish defectors, not only in the advanced positions but
also in the rear of the front.1540In November 1915, one even heard during a
meeting of the Progressive Bloc bureau the following remarks, noted by
Milyukov: Which people gave proof of its absence of patriotism?The
Jews.1541

1538For example: SJE, t. 7, p. 357.

1539Father Georgui Chavelsky, Vospominania poslednevo protopresvitera rusko armii i flota
(Memoirs of the last chaplain of the Russian Army and Russian Hood) v. 2-kh t, t. 1, New
York, ed. Chekhov, 1954, p. 271.
1540Mikhail Lemke, 250 dnei v tsarskoy Stavke (25 sentences 1915ioulia 1916) (250 days in
the General Staff (25 Sept. 1915-July 1916), PG GIZ, 1920, p. 353.
1541Progressivny blok v 19151916 gg (The Progressive Bloc in 19151916), Krasny arkhiv:
Istoritchesk Journal Tsentrarkhiva RSFSR, M. GIZ, 19221941, vol. 52, 1932, p. 179.
 In Germany and AustriaHungary, the Jews could occupy highlevel
positions in the administration without having to abjure their religion, and this
was also true in the army. While in Russia, a Jew could not become an officer if
he did not convert to orthodoxy, and Jews with higher levels of education were
most often completing their military service as simple soldiers. One can
understand that they did not rush in to serve in such an army. (In spite of this,
Jews were decorated with the cross of SaintGeorge.) Captain G. S. Doumbadze
recalled a Jew, a law student, who received this decoration four times, but
refused to enter the School of Officers in order not to have to convert, which
would have caused his father to die of grief. Later he was executed by the
Bolsheviks.1542)
For all that, it would be unreliable and implausible to conclude that all
these accusations were mere fabrications. Chavelsky writes: The question is
too vast and complex but I cannot help saying that at that time there was no
lack of motives for accusing the Jews In times of peace, it was tolerated that
they be assigned to civilian tasks; during the war the Jews filled the combat
units During the offensives, they were often in the rear; when the army
retreated, they were at the front. More than once they spread panic in their
units It cannot be denied that the cases of espionage, of going over to the
enemy were not rare We couldnt avoid finding suspicious that the Jews were
also perfectly informed of what was happening on the front. The Jewish
telephone sometimes worked better and faster than all the countrysides
telephones It was not uncommon for the news of the front to be known in the
small hamlet of Baranovichi, situated near the General Staff, even before they
reach the Supreme Commander and his Chief of Staff.1543 (Lemke points out
the Jewish origins of Chavelsky himself.1544)
A rabbi from Moscow went to the Staff to try to persuade Chavelsky that
the Jews are like the others: there are some courageous, there are some
cowards; there are those who are loyal to their country, there are also the
bastards, the traitors, and he cited examples taken from other wars. Although
it was very painful for me, I had to tell him everything I knew about the conduct
of Jews during this war, but we were not able to reach an agreement.1545
Here is yet the testimony of a contemporary. Abraham Zisman, an engineer,
then assigned to the Evacuation Commission, recalled half a century later: To
my great shame, I must say that [the Jews who were near the front] behaved
very despicably, giving the German army all the help they could.1546
There were also charges of a strictly economic nature against the Jews who
supplied the Russian army. Lemke thus copied the order to the General Staff
signed by the Emperor on the very day of his taking office as Supreme
Commander (this order had therefore been prepared by Yanushkevich): Jewish
1542G. S. Doumbadze (Vospominania), Bibliotekafond Rousskoie Zaroubejie, f / l, A-9, p. 5.
1543Father Chavelsky, op. cit., t. 1, p. 272.
1544Lemke, op. cit., p. 37.
1545Father Chavelsky, op. cit., t. 1, pp. 272273.
1546Novaya Zaria, San Francisco, 1960, 7 May, p. 3.
suppliers abused the orders for bandages, horses, bread given to them by the
army; they receive from the military authorities documents certifying that they
have been entrusted with the task of making purchases for the needs of the
army but without any indication of quantity or place. Then the Jews have
certified copies of these documents made and distributed to their accomplices,
thus acquiring the possibility of making purchases all over the Empire. Thanks
to the solidarity between them and their considerable financial resources, they
control vast areas where are bought mainly horses and bread, which artificially
raises prices and makes more difficult the work of the officials responsible of
supplies.1547
But all these facts cannot justify the conduct of Yanushkevich and the
General Staff. Without making an effort to separate the good wheat from the
chaff, the Russian High Command launched an operation, as massive as it was
inept, for the expulsion of the Jews.
Particularly striking was the attitude towards the Jews of Galicia who lived
in AustroHungarian territory. From the beginning of the First World War, tens
of thousands of Jews fled from Galicia to Hungary, Bohemia, and Vienna.
Those who remained suffered greatly during the period of the Russian
occupation of this region.1548 Bullying, beatings, and even pogroms,
frequently organised by the Cossack units, became the daily lot of the Jews of
Galicia.1549 This is what Father Chavelsky writes: In Galicia, hatred towards
the Jews was still fuelled by the vexations inflicted under the Austrian
domination of the Russian populations [in fact, Ukrainian and Ruthenian] by
the powerful Jews1550 (in other words, these same populations were now
participating in Cossack arbitrariness).
In the province of Kovno all the Jews were deported without exception:
the sick, the wounded soldiers, the families of the soldiers who were at the
front.1551 Hostages were required under the pretext of preventing acts of
espionage, and facts of this kind became commonplace.1552
This deportation of the Jews appears in a stronger light than in 1915
contrary to what would happen in 1941there was no mass evacuation of
urban populations. The army was withdrawing, the civilian population remained
there, nobody was driven outbut the Jews and they alone were driven out, all
without exception and in the shortest possible time: not to mention the moral
wound that this represented for each one, this brought about the ruin, the loss of
ones house, ones property. Was it not, in another form, always the same
pogrom of great magnitude, but this time provoked by the authorities and not by
the populace? How can we not understand the Jewish misfortune?

1547Lemke*, op. cit., p. 325.

1548SJE, t. 2, p. 24.
1549SJE, t. 7, p. 356.
1550Father Chavelsky, op. cit., p. 271.
1551SJE, t. 7, p. 357.
1552Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 325.
 To this we must add that Yanushkevich, like the highranking officers who
were under his command, acted without any logical reflection, in disorder,
precipitation, incoherence, which could only add to the confusion. There exists
no chronicle nor account of all these military decisions. Only echoes scattered
in the press of the time, and also in The Archives of the Russian Revolution
by I. V. Hessen, a series of documents 1553 collected at random, without follow
up; and then, as with Lemke, copies of documents made by individuals. This
scattered data nevertheless allow us to form an opinion on what happened.
Some of the provisions foresee expelling Jews from the area of military
operations in the direction of the enemy (which would mean: in the direction
of the Austrians, across the front line?), to send back to Galicia the Jews
originating from there; other directives foresee deporting them to the rear of the
front, sometimes at a short distance, sometimes on the left bank of the Dnieper,
sometimes even beyond the Volga. Sometimes it is cleansing the Jews of a
zone of five versts from the front, sometimes we speak of a zone of fifty versts.
The evacuation timeframes are sometimes five days, with authorisation to take
away ones property, sometimes twentyfour hours, probably without this
authorisation; as for the resisters, they will be taken under escort. Or even: no
evacuation, but in the event of a retreat, take hostages among the significant
Jews, especially the rabbis, in case Jews denounce either Russians or Poles who
are well disposed in regard to Russia; in the event of execution of these by the
Germans, carry out the execution of the hostages (but how can we know, verify
that there were executions in Germanoccupied territory? It was truly an
incredible system!). Other instruction: we do not take hostages, we just
designate them among the Jewish population inhabiting our territoriesthey
will bear responsibility for espionage in favour of the enemy committed by
other Jews. Or even: avoid at all costs that the Jews be aware of the location of
the trenches dug in the rear of the front (so that they cannot communicate it to
the Austrians through their coreligionists,it was known that Romanian Jews
could easily cross the border); or even, on the contrary: oblige precisely civilian
Jews to dig the trenches. Or even (order given by the commander of the military
region of Kazan, General Sandetski, known for his despotic behaviour):
assemble all the Jewish soldiers in marching battalions and send them to the
front. Or, conversely: discontent provoked by the presence of Jews in the
combat units; their military ineptitude.
There is a feeling that in their campaign against the Jews, Yanushkevich
and the General Staff were losing their minds: what exactly did they want?
During these particularly difficult weeks of fighting, when the Russian troops
retreated, exhausted and short of ammunition, a flyer containing a list of
questions was sent to the heads of units and instructed them to assemble
information on the moral, military, physical qualities of Jewish soldiers, as

1553Dokoumenty o presledovanii ievreev (Documents on the persecution of the Jews), Arkhiv

Rousskoi Revolutsii (Archives of the Russian Revolution), izdavayemy I.V. Gessenom,
Berlin: Slovo, 19221937, t. 19, 1928, pp. 245284.
well as their relations with local Jewish populations. And the possibility was
considered of completely excluding Jews from the army after the war.
We also do not know the exact number of displaced persons. In The Book
of the Jewish Russian World, we read that in April 1915, 40,000 Jews were
expulsed from the province of Courland, and in May 120,000 of them were
expelled from Kovno.1554 In another place, the same book gives an overall figure
for the whole period, amounting to 250,0001555 including Jewish refugees,
which means that the deportees would hardly have accounted for more than half
of this digit. After the revolution, the newspaper Novoie Vremia published
information according to which the evacuation of all the inhabitants of Galicia
dispersed on the territory of Russia 25,000 persons, including nearly a thousand
Jews.1556 (These are numbers that, for the moment, are too weak to be probable.)
On 1011 May 1915, the order was issued to put an end to the
deportations, and these ceased. Jabotinsky drew the conclusion of the expulsion
of the Jews from the zone of the front in 1915 by speaking of a catastrophe
probably unprecedented since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain in
the fifteenth century.1557 But is there not also something of a move of History in
the fact that this massive deportationitself, and the indignant reactions it
provokedwould make a concrete contribution to the much desired
suppression of the Pale of Settlement?
Leonid Andreyev had rightly observed: This famous barbarity of which
we are accused of rests entirely and exclusively on our Jewish question and
its bloody outbursts.1558
These deportations of Jews were resonant on a planetary scale. From
Petersburg, during the war, Jews defending human rights transmitted
information about the situation of their coreligionists to Europe; Among them,
Alexander Isayevich Braudo distinguished himself by his tireless activity. 1559 A.
G. Shlyapnikov relates that Gorky had sent him documents on the persecution
of Jews in Russia; he brought them to the United States. All this information
spread widely and rapidly in Europe and America, raising a powerful wave of
indignation.
And if the best among the representatives of the Jewish community and the
Jewish intelligentsia feared that the victory of Germany would only
reinforce antiSemitism and, for that reason alone, there could be no question
of sympathies towards the Germans or hopes for their victory,1560 a Russian

1554A. A. Goldenweiser, Pravovoc polojenie ievreyev v Rossii (The legal situation of Jews in
Russia), BJWR-1, p. 135.
1555G. I. Aronson, V borbe za grajdanskie i nalsionainyc prava Obchtchestvennye tetchenia v
rousskom evrestve (The struggle for civil and national rights: the movements of opinion
within the Jewish community of Russia), BJWR-1, p. 232.
1556Novoie Vremia, 1917, 13 April, p. 3.
1557Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 1, Introduction by V. Jabotinsky, p. xi.
1558L. Andreyev, Pervaya stoupen (First Step), Shchit (the Shield), 1916, p. 5.
1559Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, pp. 343344.
1560Ibidem, p. 344.
military intelligence officer in Denmark reported in December 1915 that the
success of antiRussian propaganda is also facilitated by Jews who openly
declare that they do not wish the victory of Russia and its consequence: the
autonomy promised to Poland, for they know that the latter would take energetic
measures with a view to the expulsion of Jews from within its borders 1561; In
other words, it was Polish antiSemitism that was to be feared, not German anti
Semitism: the fate which awaited the Jews in a Poland which had become
independent would perhaps be even worse than that which they underwent in
Russia.
The British and French Governments were somewhat embarrassed to
openly condemn the attitude of their ally. But at that time, the United States was
increasingly engaged in the international arena. And in the still neutral America
of 1915, sympathies were divided; some of the Jews who came from
Germany were sympathetic to the latter, even though they did not manifest it in
an active manner.1562 Their dispositions were maintained by the Jews from
Russia and Galicia, who, as the Socialist Ziv testified, wished for (it could no
longer be otherwise) the defeat of Russia, and even more so by the professional
revolutionists RussianJews who had settled in the United States. 1563 To this
was added the antiRussian tendencies in the American public: very recently, in
1911, the dramatic breakup of an eightyyearold USRussian economic
agreement took place. The Americans regarded the official Russia as a country
that was corrupt, reactionary, and ignorant.1564
This quickly translated into tangible effects. As early as August 1915, we
read in the reports that Milyukov was holding meetings of the Progressive Bloc:
The Americans pose as a condition [of aid to Russia] the possibility for
American Jews to have free access to Russian territory, 1565always the same
source of conflict as in 1911 with T. Roosevelt.And when a Russian
parliamentary delegation went to London and Paris in early 1916 to apply for
financial aid, it was faced to a categorical refusal. The episode is told in detail
by Shingaryov1566, in the report he presented on 20 June 1916 to the Military and
Maritime Commission of the Duma after the return of the delegation. In
England, Lord Rothschild replied to this request: You are affecting our credit
in the United States. In France, Baron Rothschild declared: In America, the
Jews are very numerous and active, they exert a great influence, in such a
manner that the American public is very hostile to you. (Then Rothschild
expressed himself even more brutally, and Shingaryov demanded that his

1561Lemke, op. cit., p. 310.

1562Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 345.
1563G. A. Ziv, Trotsky: Kharakteiistika. Po litchym vospominaniam (Trotsky: a characteristic,
personal memories), New York. Narodopravstvo, 1921, 30 June, pp. 6063.
1564German Bernsrein, Retch, 1917, 30 June, pp. 12.
1565Progressivny blok v 19151917 gg., Krasny arkhiv, 1932, vol. 5051, p. 136.
1566Andrei Shingaryov(18691918), one of the leaders of the Cadet party, was a member of
the first Provisional Government in 1917. Arrested by the Bolsheviks and massacred in his
prison.
words not be included in the record.) This financial pressure from the
Americans, the rapporteur concludes, is a continuation of a policy that has led
them to break our trade agreement in 1911 (but, of course, to that was added the
massive deportations of Jews undertaken in the meantime). Jakob Schiff, who
had spoken so harshly of Russia in 1905, now declared to a French
parliamentarian sent to America: We will give credit to England and France
when we have the assurance that Russia will do something for the Jews; the
money you borrow from us goes to Russia, and we do not want that. 1567
Milyukov evoked the protests at the Duma tribune of millions and millions of
American Jews who have met a very wide echo in American opinion. I have
in my hands many American newspapers that prove it Meetings ending with
scenes of hysteria, crying jags at the evocation of the situation of the Jews in
Russia. I have a copy of the provision made by President Wilson, establishing a
Jewish Day throughout the United States to collect aid for the victims. And
when we ask for money to American bankers, they reply: Pardon, how is that?
We agree to lend money to England and France, but on condition that Russia
does not see the colour of it The famous banker Jakob Schiff, who rules the
financial world in New York, categorically refuses any idea of a loan to
Russia1568
The Encyclopdia Judaica, written in English, confirms that Schiff, using
his influence to prevent other financial institutions lending to Russia, pursued
this policy throughout the First World War1569 and put pressure on other banks
to do the same.
For all these upheavals provoked by the deportations, both in Russia and
abroad, it was the Council of Ministers who had to pay for the broken pots even
though the Staff did not consult it and gave no attention to its protests. I have
already quoted a few snippets of the passionate debates that were agitating the
Cabinet on this subject.1570 Here are a few others. Krivoshein 1571 was in favour
of temporarily granting the Jews the right to settle in all the cities of Russia:
This favour granted to the Jews will be useful not only from a political point of
view, but also from an economic point of view Up to now, our policy in this
field made one think of this sleeping miser on his gold, which does not benefit
from it and does not allow others to do so. But Roukhlov replied: this proposal
constitutes a fundamental and irreversible modification of legislation which
has been introduced throughout History with the aim of protecting the Russian
heritage from the control of the Jews, and the Russian people of the deleterious

1567Mejdunarodnoe polojenie tsarskoi Rossii vo vremia mirovo vony (The international

situation of tsarist Russia during the world war), Krasny arkhiv, 1934, vol. 64, pp. 514.
1568Doklad P. N. Milioukova v Voennomorsko komissii Gosoud. Doumy 19 iounia 1916g.,
Krasny arkhiv, 1933, t. 58, pp. 1314.
1569Encyclopdia Judaica, Jerusalem, 1971, vol. 14, p. 961.
1570A. Solzhenitsyn, Krasnoye Koleso (The Red Wheel), t. 3, M. Voenizdat, 1993, pp. 259
263, (French translation: March seventeen, t. 1, Paris: Fayard).
1571Close collaborator of Stolypin, Minister of Agriculture (19061915), dies in emigration
(18571921).
influence of the neighbouring of the Jews You specify that this favour will be
granted only for the duration of the war, but we must not be in denial: after
the war, not one government will be found to send the Jews back to the Pale
of Settlement The Russians are dying in the trenches and meanwhile the Jews
will settle in the heart of Russia, benefit from the misfortunes endured by the
people, of general ruin. What will be the reaction of the army and the Russian
people?And again, during the following meeting: The Russian population
endures unimaginable hardships and suffering, both on the front and in the
interior of the country, while Jewish bankers buy from their coreligionists the
right to use Russias misfortune to exploit tomorrow this exsanguinated
people.1572
But the ministers acknowledged that there was no other way out. This
measure was to be applied with exceptional speedin order to meet the
financial needs of the war.1573 All of them, with the exception of Roukhlov,
signed their name at the bottom of the bulletin authorising the Jews to settle
freely (with the possibility of acquiring real estate) throughout the Empire, with
the exception of the capitals, agricultural areas, provinces inhabited by the
Cossacks and the Yalta region.1574 In the autumn of 1915 was also repealed the
system of the annual passport, which had hitherto been compulsory for the Jews
who were now entitled to a permanent passport. (These measures were followed
by a partial lifting of the numerus clausus in educational establishments and the
authorisation to occupy the functions of litigator within the limits of the
representation quotas.1575) The opposition that these decisions met in the public
opinion was broken under the pressure of the war.
Thus, after a century and a quarter of existence, the Pale of Settlement of
the Jews disappeared forever. And to add insult to injury, as Sliosberg notes,
this measure, so important in its content, amounting to the abolition of the
Pale of Settlement, this measure for which had fought in vain for decades the
Russian Jews and the liberal circles of Russia, went unnoticed! 1576 Unnoticed
because of the magnitude assumed by the war. Streams of refugees and
immigrants were then overwhelming Russia.
The Refugee Committee, set up by the government, also provided displaced
Jews with funds to help settlements. 1577 Until the February revolution, the
Conference on Refugees continued its work and allocated considerable sums to
the various national committees, including the Jewish Committee.1578 It goes

1572Tiajlye dni. Sekretnye zasedania soveta ministrov. 16 iouliasentiabria 1915 (The difficult
days, the secret meetings of the Council of Ministers, 16 JulySeptember 1915). Sost. A. N.
Yakhontov, Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1926, vol. 18, pp. 4748, 57.
1573Ibidem, p. 12.
1574SJE, t. 7, pp. 358359.
1575Ibidem, p. 359.
1576Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 341.
1577I. L Teitel, Iz moiii jizni za 40 let (Memories of 40 years of my life), Paris: I. Povolotski i
ko., 1925, p. 210.
1578Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 342.
without saying that were added to this the funds contributed by many Jewish
organisations that had embarked on this task with energy and efficiency. Among
them was the Union of Jewish Craftsmen (UJC), created in 1880, well
established and already extending its action beyond the Pale of Settlement. The
UJC had developed a cooperation with the World Relief Committee and the
Joint (Committee for the distribution of funds for aid to waraffected Jews).
All of them provided massive aid to the Jewish populations of Russia; The
Joint had rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia and Austria
Hungary.1579 In Poland, the UJC helped Jewish candidates for emigration or
settled as farmersbecause during the war, Jews who lived in small villages
had been driven, not without coercion by the German occupier, to the work of
the land.1580 There was also the Jewish Prophylactic Society (JPS), founded in
1912; it had given itself for mission not only to direct medical aid to the Jews,
but also the creation of sanatoriums, dispensaries, the development of sanitary
hygiene in general, the prevention of diseases, the struggle against the physical
deterioration of Jewish populations (Nowhere in Russia there existed yet
organisations of this kind). Now, in 1915, these detachments were organising
for Jewish emigrants, all along their route and at their place of destination,
supply centres, flying medical teams, countryside hospitals, shelters and
pdiatric consultations.1581Also in 1915, appeared the Jewish Association for
the Assistance of War Victims (JAAWV); benefiting of support from the
Committee for Refugees and the so generously endowed by the State Zemgor
(association of the Union of Zemstvos and the Union of Cities), as well as
credit from America, the JAAWV set up a vast network of missionaries to help
the Jews during their journey and their new place of residence, with rolling
kitchens, canteens, clothing distribution points, (employment agencies,
vocational training centres), childcare establishments, schools. What an
admirable organisation!let us remember that approximately 250,000 refugees
and displaced persons were taken care of; according to official figures, the
number of these was already reaching 215,000 in August 1916.1582and there
was also the Political Bureau near the Jewish Deputies of the fourth Duma,
which resulted from an agreement between the Jewish Popular Group, the
Jewish Peoples Party, the Jewish Democratic Group and the Zionists; during
the war, it deployed considerable activity.1583
In spite of all the difficulties, the war gave a strong impulse to the spirit of
initiative of the Jews, whipped their will to take charge. 1584 During these years
the considerable forces hidden hitherto in the depths of the Jewish

1579SJE, t. 2, p. 345.
1580D. Lvovitch, L. Bramson i Soiouz ORT (L. Bramson and the UJC), JW-2, New York, 1944,
p. 29.
1581I. M. Troitsky, Samodeiatetnost i camopomochtch evreiev v Rossii (The spirit of initiative
and mutual help among the Jews of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 479480, 485489.
1582Aronson, BJWR-1, p. 232; I. Troitsky, ibidem, p. 497.
1583Aronson, op. cit., p. 232.
1584I. Troitsky, op. cit., p. 484.
consciousness matured and revealed to the open immense reserves of
initiative in the most varied fields of political and social action. 1585In
addition to the resources allocated by the mutual aid committees, the JAAWV
benefited from the millions paid to it by the government. At no time did the
Special Conference on Refugees reject our suggestion on the amount of aid:
25 million in a year and a half, which is infinitely more than what the Jews had
collected (the government paid here the wrongs of the General Staff); as for the
sums coming from the West, the Committee could retain them1586 for future use.
It is thus that with all these movements of the Jewish populationrefugees,
displaced persons, but also a good number of volunteersthe war significantly
altered the distribution of Jews in Russia; important settlements were
established in towns far from the front, mainly Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh,
Penza, Samara, Saratov, but also in the capitals. Although the abolition of the
Pale of Settlement did not concern Saint Petersburg and Moscow, these two
cities were now practically open. Often, they would go there to join relatives or
protectors who had settled there long ago. In the course of memoirs left by
contemporaries, one discovers for example a dentist of Petersburg named
Flakke: tenroom apartment, footman, servant, cookwelloff Jews were not
uncommon, and, in the middle of the war, while there was a shortage of housing
in Petrograd, they opened up opportunities for Jews from elsewhere. Many of
them changed their place of residence during those years: families, groups of
families that left no trace in history, except sometimes in family chronicles of a
private nature, such as those of the parents of David Azbel: Aunt Ida left the
coldness and somnolence of Chernigov at the beginning of the First World War
to come and settle in Moscow.1587 The new arrivals were often of a very modest
condition, but some of them came to influential positions, such as Poznanski, a
clerk in the Petrograd Military Censorship Commission, who had the upper
hand over all secret affairs.1588
Meanwhile, the General Staff mechanically poured out its torrents of
directives, sometimes respected, sometimes neglected: to exclude Jews under
the banner of all activities outside armed service: secretary, baker, nurse,
telephonist, telegrapher. Thus, in order to prevent the antigovernment
propaganda supposed to be carried out by Jewish doctors and nurses, they
should be assigned not to hospitals or country infirmaries, but to places not
conducive to propaganda activities such as, for example, the advanced
positions, the transport of the wounded on the battlefield. 1589 In another
directive: expel the Jews out of the Union of Zemstvos, the Union of Cities and
the Red Cross, where they concentrate in great numbers to escape armed service
(as did also, we note in passage, tens of thousands of Russians), use their
1585Aronson, op. cit., p. 230.
1586Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, pp. 329331.
1587D. Azbel, Do, vo vremia i posle (Before, during and after), Vremya i my, New York,
Jerusalem, Paris. 1989, no. 104, pp. 192193.
1588Lemke, op. cit., p. 468.
1589SJE, t. 7, p. 357.
advantageous position for propaganda purposes (as did any liberal, radical, or
socialist who respected themselves) and, above all, spread rumours about the
incompetence of the high command (which corresponded to a large extent to
reality1590). Other bulletins warned against the danger of keeping the Jews in
positions that brought them into contact with sensitive information: in the
services of the Union of Zemstvos of the western front in April 1916, all the
important branches of the administration (including those under the defence
secrecy) are in the hands of Jews, and the names of those responsible for the
registration and classification of confidential documents are cited, as well as
that of the Director of the Department of Public Information, who, by his
functions, has free access to various services of the army at the rear of the front
or in the regions.1591
However, there is no evidence that the ranting of the General Staff on the
necessity of chasing the Jews from the Zemgor had any tangible results. Always
well informed, Lemke observes that the directives of the military authorities on
the exclusion of the Jews from the Zemgor were not welcomed. A bulletin
was published stating that all persons of Jewish confession who are dismissed
by order of the authorities shall be reimbursed for two months with salary and
travel allowances and with the possibility of being recruited prioritarily in the
establishments of the Zemgor at the rear of the front. 1592 (The Zemgor was the
darling of the influential Russian press. It is thus that it unanimously declined to
reveal its sources of financing: in 25 months of war, on 1 September 1916, 464
million rubles granted by the governmentequipment and supplies were
delivered directly from state warehousescompared with only nine million
collected by Zemstvos, towns, collects.1593 If the press refused to publish these
figures, it is because it would have emptied of its meaning the opposition
between the philanthropic and charitable action of the Zemgor and that of a
stupid, insignificant, and lame government.)
Economic circumstances and geographical conditions meant that among the
armys suppliers, there were many Jews. A letter of complaint expressing the
anger of the OrthodoxRussian circles of Kiev, driven by their duty as
patriots, points to Salomon Frankfurt, who occupied a particularly high
position, that of delegate of the Ministry of Agriculture to the supply of the
army in bacon (it must be said that complaints about the disorganisation
caused by these requisitions were heard all the way to the Duma). Also in Kiev,
an obscure agronomist of a Zemstvo of the region, Zelman Kopel, was
immortalised by History because of having ordered an excessive requisition just
before Christmas 1916, he deprived of sugar a whole district during the holidays

1590Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1928, t. XIX, pp. 274, 275.

1591Lemke, op. cit., p. 792.
1592Ibidem, p. 792.
1593S. Oldenburg, Tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolai II (the reign of Emperor Nicholas II), t. 2,
Munich, 1949, p. 192.
(In this case, a complaint was also lodged against the local administration of the
Zemstvos1594).
In November 1916, the deputy N. Markov, stigmatising in the Duma the
marauders of the rear and trappers of State property and National Defence,
designated, as usual, the Jews in particular: in Kiev, once again, it was Cheftel,
a member of the Municipal Council, who blocked the warehouses and let rot
more than 2,500 tons of flour, fish, and other products that the town kept in
reserve, while at the same time, the friends of these gentlemen sold their own
fish at grossly inflated prices; it was V. I. Demchenko, elected from Kiev to the
Duma, who hid masses of Jews, rich Jews (and he enumerates them) to
make them escape military service; it was also, in Saratov, the engineer Levy
who supplied through the intermediary of the commissioner Frenkel goods to
the MilitaryIndustrial Committee at inflated prices.1595 But it should be noted
that the militaryindustrial committees set up by Guchkov 1596 were behaving in
exactly the same way with the Treasury. So
In a report of the Petrograd Security Department dated October 1916, we
can read: In Petrograd, trade is exclusively in the hands of Jews who know
perfectly the tastes, aspirations, and opinions of the man in the street; but this
report also refers to the widespread opinion on the right according to which,
among the people, the freedom enjoyed by Jews since the beginning of the
war arouses more and more discontent; it is true, there still exists officially
some Russian firms, but they are in fact controlled by Jews: it is impossible to
buy or to order anything without the intervention of a Jew. 1597 (Bolshevik
publications, such as Kaiourovs book1598 at that time in Petrograd, did not fail
to disguise reality by alleging that in May 1915, during the sacking of German
firms and shops in Moscow, the crowd also attacked the Jewish establishments
which is false, and it was even the opposite that happened: during the anti
German riot, the Jews, because of the resemblance of their surnames, protected
themselves by hanging on the front of their shop the placard: This shop is
Jewishand they were not touched, and Jewish trade was not to suffer in all
the years of war.)
However, at the top of the monarchyin Rasputins morbid entourage, a
small group of rather shady individuals played an important role. They not only
outraged the rightwing circlesit is how, in May 1916, the French ambassador
1594Iz zapisnooi knijki arkhivista, Soob. Mr. Paozerskovo (Notebooks of an Archivist, Comm.
by M. Paozerski), Krasny Arckhiv, 1926, t. 18, pp. 211212.
1595Gosudarstvennaya DumaTchetvrty sozyv (Fourth Duma of the Empire), transcript of
the proceedings, 22 Nov. 1916, pp. 366368.
1596Alexander Guchkov (18821936), founder and leader of the Octobrist party, president of
the third Duma (March 1910March 1911), president of the AllRussia War Industry
Committee, became Minister of War and Navy in the first temporary government.
Emigrated in 1918. He died in Paris.
1597Politicschkoye polojenie Rossii nakanoune Fevralskoi revoloutsii (Political situation in
Russia on the eve of the February Revolution), Krasny arkhiv, 1926, t. 17, pp. 17, 23.
1598V. Kairorov, Petrogradskie rabotchie v gody imperialistitcheskoy vonny (Workers of
Petrograd during the years of the imperialist war), M., 1930.
to Petrograd, Maurice Paleologue, noted in his diary: A bunch of Jewish
financiers and dirty speculators, Rubinstein, Manus, etc., have concluded an
agreement with him [Rasputin] and compensate him handsomely for services
rendered. On their instructions, he sends notes to ministers, to banks or to
various influential personalities.1599
Indeed, if in the past it was Baron Ginzburg who intervened openly in
favour of the Jews, this action was henceforth conducted secretly by the upstarts
who had clustered around Rasputin. There was the banker D. L. Rubinstein (he
was the director of a commercial bank in Petrograd, but confidently made his
way to the entourage of the throne: he managed the fortunes of Grand Duke
Andrei Vladimirovich, made the acquaintance of Rasputin through A.
Vyrubova1600, then was decorated with the order of Saint Vladimir, he was given
the title of State Counsellor, and therefore of the Your Excellency.) But also
the industrialist I. P. Manus (director of the Petrograd wagon factory, member of
the Putilov factory board, the board of two banks and the Russian Transport
Company, also a State Councillor).
Rubinstein attached to Rasputin a permanent secretary, Aron
Simanovich, a rich jeweller, diamond dealer, illiterate but very skilful and
enterprising (but what did Rasputin need of a secretary, he who possessed
nothing?)
This Simanovich (the best among the Jew, would have scribbled the
starets on his portrait) published in immigration a little book boasting about
the role he had played at that time. We find in it all sorts of gossip without
interest, of fabrications (he speaks of the hundreds of thousands of Jews
executed and massacred by order of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich 1601);
But, through this scum and those surges of boastfulness, one can glimpse real
facts, quite concrete.
For example, the dentists affairfor most Jewswhich had broken out
in 1913: a veritable dentists diploma factory had been elaborated which
flooded Moscow,1602their detention gave the right to permanent residence and
dispensed of military service. There were about 300 of them (according to
Simanovich: 200). The false dentists were condemned to one year in prison, but,
on the intervention of Rasputin, they were pardoned.

1599Maurice Paleologue, Tsraskaia Rossia nakanoune revolioutsii (Imperial Russia on the eve
of the revolution), M., Pd., GIZ, 1923, p. 136.
1600Anna Vyrubova (18841964), maid of honour of the Empress of which she was for a long
time the best friend, fanatic admirer of Rasputin, permanent intermediary between the
imperial couple and the starets. She was arrested in 1917, freed and rearrested, and
managed to escape to Finland where she would live for more than 45 years, completely
forgotten about.
1601A. Simanovich, Rasputin i ievrei. Vospominania litchnovo sekretaria Grigoria Rasputin
(Rasputin and the Jews, Memoirs of the personal secretary of Grigory Rasputin), [Sb.]
Sviato tchrt. Tana Grigoria Raspoutina: Vospom., Dokoumenty, Materialy sledstv.
Komissii. M. Knijnaya Palata, 1991, pp. 106107.
1602Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 347.
 During the war the Jews sought protection from Rasputin against the
police or the military authorities, and Simanovitch proudly confides that
many Jewish young men implored his help to escape the army, which, in time
of war, gave them the possibility of entering the University; There was often
no legal waybut Simanovich claims that it was always possible to find a
solution. Rasputin had become the friend and benefactor of the Jews, and
unreservedly supported my efforts to improve their condition.1603
By mentioning the circle of these new favourites, one cannot fail to
mention the unparalleled adventurer ManassevichManoulov. He was, in turn,
an official of the Ministry of the Interior and an agent of the Russian secret
police in Paris, which did not prevent him from selling abroad secret documents
from the Police Department; he had conducted secret negotiations with Gapon;
when Strmer1604 was appointed Prime Minister, he was entrusted with
exceptional secret missions.1605
Rubinstein barged into public life by buying out the newspaper Novoie
Vremia (see chapter 8), hitherto hostile to the Jews. (Irony of history: in 1876,
Suvorin had bought this paper with the money of the banker of Warsaw
Kroneberg, and at the beginning, well oriented towards the Jews, he opened its
columns to them. But, at the beginning of the war between Russia and Turkey,
Novoie Vremia suddenly changed course, went to the side of the reaction, and,
as far as the Jewish question was concerned, no longer put a stop to hatred and
bad faith.1606) In 1915, Prime Minister Goremykin 1607 and the Minister of the
Interior Khvostov, Junior1608 in vain prevented Rubinsteins buyback of the
newspaper,1609 he achieved his aims a little later,but we were already too close
to the revolution, all that did not serve much. (Another newspaper on the right,
the Grajdanin was also partially bought by Manus).
S. Melgounov nicknamed the quintet the small group which treated his
affairs in the antechamber1610 of the tsarthrough Rasputin. Given the power
of the latter, it was no small matter: dubious characters were in the immediate
vicinity of the throne and could exert a dangerous influence on the affairs of the
1603Simanovitch, pp. 89, 100, 102, 108.
1604Rasputins protg, became President of the Council of Ministers (2 February23
November 1916), with his duties as Minister of the Interior (16 March17 July) and
Foreign Affairs (20 July23 November). After February, he was arrested and imprisoned at
the PierreetPaul fortress where he died on 2 September 1917.
1605S. Melgunov, Legenda o separatnom mire. Kanoun revolioutsii (The Legend of the
Separated Peace, The Eve of the Revolution), Paris, 1957, pp. 263, 395, 397.
1606JE, t. 11, pp. 758, 759.
1607Ivan Goremykin (18391917), Prime Minister first in AprilJuly 1906, then from January
1914 to January 1916.
1608Alexis Khvostov, Junior (18721918), leader of the rights in the fourth Duma, Minister of
the Interior in 19151916. Shot by the Bolsheviks.
1609Pismo ministra vnoutrennikh del A. N. Khvostova Predsedateliou soveta ministrov I. L.
Goremykinou ot 16 dek. 1915 (Letter from the Minister of the Interior A. N. Khvostov to
the President of the Council of Ministers I. L. Goremykin, dated 16 December 1915), Delo
naroda, 1917, 21 March, p. 2.
1610Melgunov, op. cit., p. 289.
whole of Russia. Britains ambassador, Buchanan, believed that Rubinstein was
linked to the German intelligence services. 1611 This possibility cannot be ruled
out.
The rapid penetration of German espionage into Russia, and its links with
the speculators of the rear, forced General Alekseyev 1612 to solicit from the
emperor, during the summer of 1916, the authorisation to carry out
investigations beyond the area of competence of the General Staff,and thus
was constituted the Commission of Inquiry of General Batiushin. Its first
target was the banker Rubinstein, suspected of speculative operations with
German capital, financial manipulation for the benefit of the enemy,
depreciation of the ruble, overpayment of foreign agents for orders placed by
the General Stewardship, and speculative operations on wheat in the region of
the Volga. On the decision of the Minister of Justice, Rubinstein was arrested on
10 July 1916 and charged with high treason.1613
It was from the empress in person that Rubinstein received the strongest
support. Two months after his arrest, she asked the Emperor to send him
discreetly to Siberia, not to keep him here, so as not to annoy the
Jewsspeak of Rubinstein with Protopopov 1614. Two weeks later, Rasputin
sent a telegram to the emperor saying that Protopopov implores that no one
come to disturb him, including counterespionage; he spoke to me of the
detainee with gentleness, as a true Christian.Another three weeks later, the
Empress: About Rubinstein, he is dying. Send immediately a telegram [to the
northwest Front] for him to be transferred from Pskov under the authority of
the Minister of the Interiorthat is, of that good and gentle Christian of
Protopopov! And, the following day: I hope you sent the telegram for
Rubinstein, hes dying. And the next day: Have you arranged for Rubinstein
to be handed over to the Minister of the Interior? If he stays in Pskov, he will
die,please, my sweet friend!1615
On 6 December, Rubinstein was releasedten days before the
assassination of Rasputin, who had just enough time to render him a last
service. Immediately afterwards, the Minister Makarov1616, whom the Empress

1611Ibidem, p. 402.
1612Mikhail Alekseyev (18571918), then Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander. Will
advise the tsar to abdicate. Supreme Commander until 3 June 1917. After October, organiser
of the first White army, in the Don.
1613V. N. Semennikor, Politika Romanovykh nakanoune revolioutsii. Ot Antantyk Guermanii
(Politics of the Romanovs on the Eve of the Revolution: From the Agreement to Germany),
M., L., GIZ, 1926, pp. 117, 118, 125.
1614Last tsarist Minister of the Interior. Accused of intelligence with Germany (perpetrated in
Sweden during the summer of 1916 on the occasion of a trip to England of a delegation of
the Duma). Imprisoned by the Provisional Government. Executed by the Bolsheviks.
1615Pisma imperatritsy Aleksandry Fdorovny k Imperatorou Nikolaiou II / Per. S angi. V. D.
Nabokoa (Letters of the Empress Alexandra Fecorovna to the Emperor Nicholas II / trad.
from English by V. D. Nabokov), Berlin Slovo, 1922, pp. 202, 204, 211, 223, 225, 227.
1616Minister of Justice from 20 July 1916 to 2 January 1917. Executed by the Cheka in
September 1918.
detested, was dismissed. (Shortly thereafter, he will be executed by the
Bolsheviks.)It is true that with the liberation of Rubinstein, the investigation
of his case was not finished; he was arrested again, but during the redeeming
revolution of February, along with other prisoners who languished in the tsarist
gaols, he was freed of the Petrograd prison by the crowd and left ungrateful
Russia, as had the time to do so Manassevich, Manus, and Simanovich. (This
Rubinstein, we will still have the opportunity to meet him again.)
For us who live in the 90s of the twentieth century, 1617 this orgy of
plundering of State property appears as an experimental model on a very small
scale But what we find in one case or another, it is a government both
pretentious and lame that leaves Russia abandoned to its destiny.

Educated by the Rubinstein case, the General Staff had the accounts of several
banks checked. At the same time, an investigation was opened against the sugar
producers of KievHepner, Tsekhanovski, Babushkin, and Dobry. They had
obtained permission to export sugar to Persia; they had made massive
shipments, but very little merchandise had been reported by the customs and
had reached the Persian market; the rest of the sugar had disappeared, but,
according to some information, it had passed through Turkeyallied to
Germanyand had been sold on the spot. At the same time, the price of sugar
had suddenly risen in the regions of the SouthWest, where Russias sugar
industry was concentrated. The sugar deal was conducted in an atmosphere of
rigour and intransigence, but the Batiushin commission did not carry out its
investigation and forwarded the file to an investigative judge of Kiev, who
began by expanding the accused, and then they found support alongside the
throne.
As for the Batiushin Commission itself, its composition left much to be
desired. Its ineffectiveness in investigating the Rubinstein case was highlighted
by Senator Zavadski.1618 In his memoirs, General Lukomski, a member of the
Staff, recounts that one of the chief jurists of the commission, Colonel Rezanov,
an indisputably competent man, was also found to be quite fond of menus, good
restaurants, boozy dinners; another, Orlov, proved to be a renegade who worked
in the secret police after 1917, then went to the Whites and, in emigration,
would be marked by his provocative conduct. There were probably other shady
figures on the committee who did not refuse bribes and had capitalised on the
release of the detainees. Through a series of indiscriminate acts, the commission
drew the attention of the Military Justice of Petrograd and senior officials of the
Ministry of Justice.

1617Time when the writing of this present volume was completed, and allusion to the state of
Yeltsinian Russia.
1618S. V. Zavadski, Na velikom izlome (The Great Fracture), Archives of the Russian
Revolution, 1923, t. 8, pp. 1922.
 However, there was not only the Staff to deal with the problem of
speculators, in relation to the activities of the Jews in general. On 9 January
1916, Acting Director of the Police Department, Kafafov, signed a classified
defence directive, which was addressed to all provincial and city governors and
all gendarmerie commands. But the intelligence service of public opinion
soon discovered the secret, and a month later, on 10 February, when all business
ceased, Chkheidze1619 read out this document from the tribune of the Duma. And
what could be read there was not only that the Jews make revolutionary
propaganda, but that in addition to their criminal activity of propaganda
they have set themselves two important objectives: to artificially raise the price
of essential commodities and withdraw from circulation common currency
they thus seek to make the population lose confidence in the Russian
currency, to spread the rumour that the Russian government is bankrupt, that
there is not enough metal to make coins. The purpose of all this, according to
the bulletin, was to obtain the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, because the
Jews think that the present period is the most favourable to achieve their ends
by maintaining the trouble in the country. The Department did not accompany
these considerations with any concrete measure: it was simply for
information.1620
Here is the reaction of Milyukov: The method of Rostopchin1621 is used
with the Jewsthey are presented to an overexcited crowd, saying: they are the
guilty, they are yours, do what you want with them.1622
During the same days, the police encircled the Moscow Stock Exchange,
carried out identity checks among the operators and discovered seventy Jews in
an illegal situation; a roundup of the same type took place in Odessa. And this
also penetrated the Duma Chamber, causing a real cataclysmwhat the Council
of Ministers feared so much a year ago was happening: In the current period,
we can not tolerate within the Duma a debate on the Jewish question, a debate
which could take on a dangerous form and serve as a pretext for the aggravation
of conflicts between nationalities.1623 But the debate really took place and
lasted several months.
The most lively and passionate reaction to the bulletin of the Department
was that of Shingaryov1624he had no equal to communicate to his listeners all
the indignation which aroused in his heart: there is not an ignominy, not a
turpitude which the State has not been guilty towards the Jew, it which is a
1619Menshevik leader, deputy to the third and fourth Dumas; In February 1917, president of the
Petrograd Soviet. Emigrated in 1921, committed suicide in 1926.
1620Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1925, vol. 19, pp. 267268.
1621Governor of Moscow at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was long believed that
he had set fire to the city when the French armed there in 1812. Father of the Countess of
Segur.
1622Stenographic record of the debates of the Fourth Duma. 10 February 1916, p. 1312.
1623Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1926, t. 18, p. 49.
1624Andrei Shingaryov(18691918), Zemstvo doctor, leader of the Cadet party, will be
Minister of Agriculture in the first Provisional Government, and Finance in the second.
Slaughtered in his hospital bed on 18 January 1918.
Christian state spreading calumny over a whole people without any
foundation Russian society will be able to cure its evils only when you will
withdraw that thorn, this evil that gangrenes the life of the countrythe
persecution of nationalities Yes, we hurt for our government, we are ashamed
of our State! The Russian army found itself without ammunition in Galicia
and the Jews would be responsible for it? As for the rise in prices, there
are many complex reasons for this Why, in this case, does the bulletin
mention only the Jews, why does it not speak of the Russians and even others?
Indeed, prices had soared all over Russia. And the same goes for the
disappearance of coins. And it is in a bulletin of the Department of Police that
one can read all this!1625
Nothing to object.
Easy to write a bulletin in the back of an office, but very unpleasant to
respond to a raging Parliament. Yet this was what its author, Kafafov, had to
resolve. He defended himself: the bulletin did not contain any directive, it was
not addressed to the population, but to local authorities, for information and not
for action; it aroused passions only after being sold by timorous civil servants
and made public from the rostrum. How strange, continued Kafafov: we are not
talking here of other confidential bulletins which have also, probably, been
leaked; thus, as early as May 1915, he had himself initialled one of this order:
There is a rise in hatred towards Jews in certain categories of the population of
the Empire, and the Department demands that the most energetic measures be
taken in order to prevent any demonstration going in this direction, any act of
violence of the population directed against the Jews, to take the most vigorous
measures to stifle in the bud the propaganda that begins to develop in certain
places, to prevent it from leading to outbreaks of pogroms. And even, a month
earlier, at the beginning of February, this directive sent to Poltava: reinforce
surveillance so as to be able to prevent in time any attempt to pogrom against
the Jews.1626
And to complain: how is it that that bulletins such as these do not interest
public opinion, that, those, they are allowed to pass in the utmost silence?
In his heated speech, Shingaryov immediately warned the Duma against the
danger of engaging in debates on the boundless ocean of the Jewish question.
But that was what happened because of the publicity reserved for this bulletin.
Moreover, Shingaryov himself pushed clumsily in this direction, abandoning the
ground for the defence of the Jews to declare that the real traitors were the
Russians: Sukhomlinov1627, Myasoedov, and General Grigoriev, who had
shamefully capitulated at Kovno.1628
This provoked a reaction. Markov1629 objected that he had no right to speak
of Sukhomlinov, the latter being for the moment only accused. (The Progressive
1625Stenographic Record of the Debates of the Fourth Duma, 8 March 1916, pp. 30373040.
1626Ibidem, pp. 31373141.
1627Minister of War ineffective from 1909 to 1915, arrested on 3 May 1916, released in
November through Rasputin.
1628Ibidem, pp. 30363037.
Bloc was successful in the Sukhomlinov affair, but at the end of the Provisional
Government, it itself had to admit that time had been wasted, that there had
been no treason there.) Myasoedov had already been convicted and executed
(but some facts may suggest that it was also a fabricated affair); Markov limited
himself to adding that he had been hanged in the company of six Jewish spies
(what I did not know: Myasoedov had been judged alone) and that, here is one
to six, that was the report.1630
Among certain proposals contained in the programme that the Progressive
Bloc had succeeded in putting together in August 1915, the autonomy of
Poland seemed somewhat fantastical insofar as it was entirely in the hands of
the Germans; the equality of rights for peasants did not have to be demanded
of the government, because Stolypin had made it happen and it was precisely
the Duma which did not endorse it, positing precisely as a condition the
simultaneous equality of the Jews; so much so that the gradual introduction of
a process of reducing the limitations of rights imposed on Jewseven though
the evasiveness of this formulation was obviousnevertheless became the main
proposal of the programme of the Bloc. The latter included Jewish deputies 1631
and the Yiddish press reported: The Jewish community wishes the Progressive
Bloc a good wind!
And now, after two years of an exhausting war, heavy losses on the front
and a feverish agitation in the rear, the extreme right waved its admonitions:
You have understood that you must explain yourself before the people over
your silence about the military superiority of the Germans, your silence about
the fight against the soaring prices, and your excessive zeal to want to grant
equal rights to the Jews! That is what you are demanding of the government,
at the present moment, in the midst of war,and if it does not meet these
demands you blow it off and recognise only one government, the one that will
give equality to the Jews! But we are surely not going to give equality now,
just now that everyone is whitehot against the Jews; in doing so, you only raise
public opinion against these unfortunates.1632
Deputy Friedman refutes the claim that the people are at the height of
exasperation: In the tragic context of the oppression of the Jews, however,
there is a glimmer of hope, and I do not want to ignore it: it is the attitude of the
Russian populations of the interior provinces towards the Jewish refugees who
arrive there. These Jewish refugees receive help and hospitality. It is the
pledge of our future, our fusion with the Russian people. But he insists that the

1629Nikolai Markov (18761945), called at the Duma MarkovII to distinguish him from
homonyms. Leader of the extreme right. In November 1918, he went to Finland, then to
Berlin and Paris where he directed a monarchist revue, The Two Headed Eagle. He moved
to Germany in 1936, where he directed an antiSemitic publication in Russian. Died in
Wiesbaden.
1630Ibidem, p. 5064.
1631SJE, t. 7, p. 359.
1632Stenographic Record of the Debates of the Fourth Duma, February 1916, p. 1456 and 28
29 February 1916, p. 2471.
responsibility for all the misfortunes of the Jews rests with the government, and
he lays his accusations at the highest level: There was never a pogrom when
the government did not want it. Through the members of the Duma, I am
addressing the 170 million inhabitants of Russia: they want to use your hands
to lift the knife on the Jewish people of Russia!1633
To this was replied: do the deputies of the Duma only know what is thought
of in the country? The country does not write in Jewish newspapers, the
country suffers, works it is bogged down in the trenches, it is there, the
country, and not in the Jewish newspapers where work John Does obeying
mysterious guidelines. It was even said, That the press is controlled by the
government is an evil, but there is an even greater evil: that the press is
controlled by the enemies of the Russian State!1634
As Shingaryov had sensed, the liberal majority of the Duma was, now, no
longer interested in prolonging the debate on the Jewish question. But the
process was on and nothing could stop it. And it was a neverending series of
speeches that came in the middle of the other cases to be dealt with for four
months until the end of the fall session.
The right accused the Progressive Bloc: no, the Duma was not going to
tackle the problem of rising prices! You are not going to fight with the banks,
the unions, against strikes in the industry, because that would be tantamount to
fighting against the Jews. Meanwhile, the Reformist Municipality of Petrograd
gave the town supply to two Israelites, Levenson and Lesman: the first the
meat supply, the second the food shopsalthough he had illegally sold flour to
Finland. Other examples of suppliers artificially inflating prices are given. 1635
(None of the deputies took it upon himself to defend these speculators.)
After that, it is impossible that the question not come up for discussion, so
current during these years of war, of the numerus clausus! As we have seen, it
had been reestablished after the revolution of 1905, but was gradually
mitigated by the common practice of day school in high schools and the
authorisation given to Jews who had completed their medical studies abroad to
pass the State diploma in Russia; other measures were taken in this direction
but not the abrogation pure and simplein 1915, when the Pale of Settlement
was abolished. P. N. Ignatiev, Minister of Public Instruction in 19151916, also
reduced the numerus clausus in higher education institutions.
And in the spring of 1916, the walls of the Duma echoed the debate on this
issue at length. The statistics of the Ministry of Education are examined, and
Professor Levachev, deputy of Odessa, states that the provisions of the Council
of Ministers (authorising the derogatory admission of children of Jews called up
for military service) have been arbitrarily extended by the Ministry of Education
to the children of Zemgor employees, evacuation agencies, hospitals, as well as
persons declaring themselves [deceitfully] dependent on a parent called up for

1633Ibidem, pp. 14131414, 1421, 1422.

1634Ibidem, pp. 14531454, 2477.
1635Ibidem, p. 4518.
military service. Thus, of the 586 students admitted in 1915 in the first year of
medicine at the University of Odessa, 391 are Jews, that is to say two thirds,
and that only one third remain for the other nationalities. At the University of
RostovonDon: 81% of Jewish students at the Faculty of Law, 56% at the
Faculty of Medicine, and 54% at the Faculty of Sciences.1636
Gurevich replies to Levachev: this is proof that the numerus clausus is
useless! What is the use of the numerus clausus, when even this year, when the
Jews benefited from a higher than normal arrangement, there was enough room
to welcome all Christians who wanted to enter the university? What do you
wantempty classrooms? Little Germany has a large number of Jewish
teachers, yet it does not die of it!1637
Markovs objection: Universities are empty [because Russian students are
at war, and they send [to the universities] masses of Jews. Escaping military
service, the Jews have overwhelmed the University of Petrograd and, thanks
to that, will swell the ranks of the Russian intelligentsia This phenomenon
is detrimental to the Russian people, even destructive, because every people is
subject to the power of its intelligentsia. The Russians must protect their
elites, their intelligentsia, their officials, their government; the latter must be
Russian.1638
Six months later, in the autumn of 1916, Friedman harped on about this by
asking the Duma the following question: Thus it would be better for our
universities to remain empty it would be better for Russia to find itself
without an intellectual elite rather than admit Jews in too great numbers?1639
On the one hand, Gurevitch was obviously right: why should the
classrooms have been left empty? Let each one do what he has to do. But, in
asking the question in these terms, did he not comfort the suspicions and
bitterness of the right: therefore, we do not work together? One group to make
war, the other to study?
(My father, for examplehe interrupted his studies at Moscow University
and joined the army as a volunteer. It seemed at the time that there was no
alternative: to not go to the front would have been dishonourable. Who, among
these young Russian volunteers, and even among the professors who remained
in the universities, understood that the future of the country was not only played
on the battlefields? No one understood it neither in Russia, nor in Europe.)
In the spring of 1916, the debate on the Jewish question was suspended on
the grounds that it provoked undesirable agitation in public opinion. But the
problem of nationalities was put back on the agenda by an amendment to the
law on township Zemstvos. The creation of this new administrative structure
was discussed during the winter of 191617 during the last months of the
existence of the Duma. And then one fine day, when the main speakers had gone

1636Ibidem, pp. 33603363.

1637Ibidem, p. 3392.
1638Ibidem, pp. 1456, 3421, 5065.
1639Ibidem, p. 90.
for refreshments or had returned to their penates, and that there was little left for
the sitting than half of the wellbehaved deputies, a peasant of Viatka, named
Tarassov, managed to sneak into the tribune. Timidly, he spoke, striving to make
the members of the house understand the problem of the amendment: it
provides that everyone is admitted, and the Jews, that is, and the Germans, all
those who will come to our township. And to those, what will be their rights?
These people who are going to be registered [in our township] but they are
going to take places, and the peasants, no one takes care of them If it is a Jew
who runs the township administration and his wife who is secretary, then the
peasants, them, what are their rights? What is going to happen, where will the
peasants be? And when our valiant warriors return, what will they be entitled
to? To stay in the back; but during the war, it was on the front line that they
were, the peasants Do not make amendments that contradict the practical
reality of the peasant life, do not give the right to the Jews and the Germans to
participate in the elections of the township zemstvos, for they are peoples who
will bring nothing useful; on the contrary, they will greatly harm and there will
be disorders across the country. We peasants, we are not going to submit to
these nationalities.1640
But in the meantime, the campaign for equal rights for Jews was in full
swing. It now enjoyed the support of organisations that had not previously been
concerned with the issue, such as the Gvozdev Central Workers Group 1641,
which represented the interests of the Russian proletariat. In the spring of 1916,
the Workers Group claimed to be informed that the reaction [implied: the
government and administration of the Ministry of the Interior] is openly
preparing a pogrom against the Jews throughout Russia. And Kozma Gvozdev
repeated this nonsense at the Congress of MilitaryIndustrial Committees.In
March 1916, in a letter to Rodzianko1642, the Workers Group protested against
the suspension of the debate on the Jewish question in the Duma; And the same
Group accused the Duma itself of complacency towards the antiSemites: The
attitude of the majority at the meeting of 10 March is de facto to give its direct
support and to reinforce the policy of antiJewish pogroms led by the power
By its support of the militant antiSemitism of the ruling circles, the majority in
the Duma is a serious blow to the work of national defence. 1643 (They had not
agreed, they had not realised that in the Duma it was precisely the left who
needed to end the debate.)The workers also benefited from the support of
Jewish groups who, according to a report by the Security Department in

1640Ibidem, pp. 10691071.

1641Also said Kouzma Gvozdiov (born in 1883), a worker, a Menshevik leader, a defender,
president of the Central Workers Group; After February, member of the Central Executive
Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Minister of Labour of the Fourth Provisional
Government. In camp or in prison from 1930 onwards.
1642President of the Duma from 1911 to 1917.
1643K istorii gvosdevchtchiny (Contribution to the history of the Gvozdev movement), Krasny
arkhiv. 1934, t. 67, p. 52.
October 1916, have overwhelmed the capital and, without belonging to any
party, are pursuing a policy violently hostile to the power.1644
And the power in all this? Without direct evidence, it can be assumed that
within the ministerial teams that succeeded each other in 1916, the decision to
proclaim equal rights for the Jews was seriously considered. This had been
mentioned more than once by Protopopov, who had already succeeded, it seems,
in turning Nicholas II in this direction. (Protopopov also had an interest in going
quickly to cut short the campaign that the left had set in motion against him.)
And General Globachev, who was the last to direct the Department of Security
before the revolution, writes in his memoirs, in the words of Dobrovolsky, who
was also the last Minister of Justice of the monarchy: The bill on equal rights
for the Jews was already ready [in the months that preceded the revolution] and,
in all likelihood, the law would have been promulgated for the 1917 Easter
celebrations.1645
But in 1917, the Easter celebrations were to take place under a completely
different system. The ardent aspirations of our radicals and liberals would then
have come true.
Everything for victory!Yes, but not with that power! Public opinion,
both among the Russians and among the Jews, as well as the press, all were
entirely directed towards Victory, were the first to claim it,only, not with this
government! Not with this tsar! All were still persuaded of the correctness of the
simple and brilliant reasoning they had held at the beginning of the war: before
it ends (because afterwards it would be more difficult) and by winning a victory
over victory on the Germans, to throw down the tsar and change the political
regime.
And that is when the equal rights for the Jews would come.

We have examined in many ways the circumstances in which took place one
hundred and twenty years of common life between Russians and Jews within
the same State. Among the difficulties, some have found a solution over time,
others emerged and increased in the course of the years prior to the spring of
1917. But the evolving nature of the processes in motion visibly taking over and
promised a constructive future.
And it was at that moment that a blast disintegrated the political and social
system of Russiaand thus the fruits of evolution, but also the military
resistance to the enemy, paid for with so much blood, and finally the prospects
for a future of fulfilment: it was the revolution of February.
1644Politikchkoye polojenie Rossii nakanoune Fevralskoi revolioutsii (Political situation in
Russia on the eve of the February Revolution), Krasny arkhiv, 1926, t. 17, p. 14.
1645K. I. Globatchev, Pravda o russko revolutionsii: Vospominania byvchevo Nachalnika
Petrogradskovo Okhrannovo Otdelenia. Dekabr 1922 (The truth about the Russian
revolution: memoirs of the former head of the Petrograd Security Department, December
1922), Khranenie Koloumbiskovo ouniversiteta, machinopis, p. 41.
 Volume 2

The Jews in the Soviet Union

 Chapter 13. The February Revolution

The 123-year-old history of unequal citizenship of the Jewish people in Russia,

from the Act of Catherine the Great of 1791, ended with the February
Revolution.
It bears looking into the atmosphere of those February days; what was the
state of society by the moment of emancipation?
There were no newspapers during the first week of the Revolutionary
events in Petrograd. And then they began trumpeting, not looking for the ways
to rebuild the state but vying with each other in denouncing all the things of the
past. In an unprecedented gesture, the newspaper of the Constitutional
Democrats (Kadets), Rech, announced that from now on all Russian life must
be rebuilt from the roots.1646 (A thousand-year life! why, all of a sudden
from the roots?) And the Stock-Market News announced a program of action:
Yank, yank all these weed-roots out! No need to worry that there might be
some useful plants among them its better to weed them all even at the price
of unavoidable innocent victims.1647 (Was this really March 1917 or March
1937?) The new Minister of Foreign Affairs Milyukov bowed and scraped: Up
to now we blushed in front of our allies because of our government. Russia
was a dead weight for our allies.1648
Rarely in those beginning days was it possible to hear reasonable
suggestions about rebuilding Russia. The streets of Petrograd were in chaos, the
police were non-functional and all over the city there was continuous disorderly
gunfire. But everything poured into a general rejoicing, though for every
concrete question, there was a mess of thoughts and opinions, a cacophony of
debating pens. All the press and society agreed on one thing the immediate
legislative enactment of Jewish equality. Fyodor Sologub eloquently wrote in
the Birzheviye Vedomosti: The most essential beginning of the civil freedom,
without which our land cannot be blessed, the people cannot be righteous,
national achievements would not be sanctified is the repeal of all
religious and racial restrictions.
The equality of Jews advanced very quickly. The 1st of March [old calendar
style], one day before the abdication, a few hours before the infamous Order
No. 1, which pushed the army to collapse, V. Makhlakov and M. Adzhemov,
1646Rech, 1917, March 17
1647Birzhevye Vedomosti, 1917, March 8 (here and further, the morning edition)
1648ibid, March 10, page 6
two commissars of the Duma Committee delegated to the Ministry of Justice,
had issued an internal Ministry of Justice directive, ordering to enlist all Jewish-
assistants to attorneys-at-law into the Guild of Judicial Attorneys. Already by
the 3rd of March the Chairman of the State Duma, M. Rodzianko, and the
Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, Prince G. Lvov, signed a
declaration which stated that one of the main goals of the new government is a
`repeal of all restrictions based upon religion, nationality and social class. 1649
Then, on the 4th of March, the Defense Minister Guchkov proposed to open a
path for the Jews to become military officers, and the Minister of Education
Manuelov proposed to repeal the percentage quotas on the Jews. Both proposals
were accepted without obstacles. On the 6th of March the Minister of Trade and
Manufacturing, Konovalov, started to eliminate national restrictions in
corporative legislation, that is, a repeal of the law forbidding purchase of land
by companies with Jewish executives.
These measures were quickly put into practice. By the 8th of March in
Moscow, 110 Jewish assistants were raised to the status of attorneys-at-law;
by March 9th in Petrograd 124 such Jews 1650; by the 8th of March in Odessa
60.1651 On the 9th of March the City Duma of Kiev, not waiting for the
upcoming elections, included in its body five Jews with voting power.1652
And here on March 20 the Provisional Government made a resolution,
prepared by the Minister of Justice, A. Kerensky, with the participation of
members of the political bureau of Jewish deputies in the 4th State Duma
legislated an act, published on March 22, that repealed all restrictions on the
rights of Russian citizens, regardless of religious creed, dogma or nationality.
This was, in essence, the first broad legislative act of the Provisional
Government. At the request of the political bureaus (of Jewish deputies), the
Jews were not specifically mentioned in the resolution.1653
But in order to repeal all the restrictions on Jews in all of our laws, in
order to uproot completely the inequality of Jews, G.B. Sliozberg recalls, it
was necessary to make a complete list of all the restrictions and the collation
of the list of laws to be repealed required great thoroughness and experience.
(This task was undertaken by Sliozberg and L.M. Bramson.) 1654 The Jewish
Encyclopedia says: The Act listed the statutes of Russian law that were being
abolished by the Act almost all those statutes (there were nearly 150)
contained some or other anti-Jewish restrictions. Subject to repeal were, in part,
all proscriptions connected to the Pale of Settlement; thereby its factual

1649Abridged Jewish Encyclopedia, (heretofore AJE) Jerusalem: Society for the Research of
Jewish Community, 1994, Volume 7, Page 377
1650Rech, March 9, 1917 Page 4: March 10, Page 5, et. al.
1651Birzheviye Vedomosti, March 9, 1917, Page 2
1652Ibid, March 10, Page 2
1653AJE, Volume 7, Page 377
1654G.B. Sliozberg, Dela Minuvshikh Dney: Zapiski Russkovo Yevreya: Paris, 1933-1934,
Volume 3, Page 360
liquidation in 1915 was legally validated.1655 The restrictions were removed
layer by layer: travel, habitation, educational institutions, participation in local
self-government, the right to acquire property anywhere in Russia, participation
in government contracts, from stock exchanges, hiring servants, workers and
stewards of a different religion, the right to occupy high positions in the
government and military service, guardianship and trusteeship. Recalling a
cancellation of an agreement with the United States, they repealed similar
restrictions on foreigners who are not at war with the Russian government,
mainly in reference to Jews coming from the United States.
The promulgation of the Act inspired many emotional speeches. Deputy
Freedman of the State Duma asserted: For the past thirty-five years the Jews
have been subjected to oppression and humiliation, unheard of and
unprecedented even in the history of our long suffering people. All of it
was the result of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.1656 Attorney O.O. Gruzenberg
stated: If the pre-Revolution Russian government was a vast and monstrous
prison, then its most stinking, terrible cell, its torture chamber was carted
away for us, the six-million Jewish people. And for the first time the Jewish
child learned about this usurious term `interest in the state school. Like
hard labor camp prisoners on their way to camp, all Jews were chained together
as despised aliens. The drops of blood of our fathers and mothers, the drops
of blood of our sisters and brothers fell on our souls, there igniting and
enlivening the unextinguishable Revolutionary fire.1657
Rosa Georgievna, the wife of Vinaver, recalls: The events (of the March
1917 Revolution) coincided with the Jewish Passover. It looked like this was a
second escape from Egypt. Such a long, long path of suffering and struggle has
passed, and how quickly everything had happened. A large Jewish meeting was
called, at which Milyukov spoke: At last, a shameful spot has been washed
away from Russia, which can now bravely step into the ranks of civilized
nations. Vinaver proposed to the gathering to build a large Jewish public
house in Petrograd in memory of the meeting, which will be called The House
of Freedom.1658
Three members of the State Duma, M. Bomash, E. Gurevich and N.
Freedman published an open letter to the Jewish people: that now our
military misfortunes could deal grave damage to the still infirm free Russia.
Free Jewish warriors will draw new strength for the ongoing struggle, with
the tenfold energy extending the great feat of arms. And here was the natural
plan: The Jewish people should quickly re-organize their society. The long-
obsolete forms of our communal life must be renewed on the free, democratic
principles.1659
1655AJE, Volume 7, Page 377
1656Rech, March 25, 1917, Page 6
1657Ibid
1658R.G. Vinaver, Memoirs (New York, 1944) // Hraneniye Guverskovo Instituta Voyni,
Revolutsiyi I Mira Stanford, California, Mashinopis, Page 92
1659Russkaya Volya, March 29, Page 5
 The author-journalist David Eisman responded to the Act with an outcry:
Our Motherland! Our Fatherland! They are in trouble! With all our hearts
we will defend our land. Not since the defense of the Temple has there been
such a sacred feat of arms.
And from the memoirs of Sliozberg: The great fortune to have lived to see
the day of the declaration of emancipation of Jews in Russia and the elimination
of our lack of rights everything I have fought for with all my strength over
the course of three decades did not fill me with the joy as it should had
been, because the collapse had begun right away.1660
And seventy years later one Jewish author expressed doubts too: Did that
formal legislative Act really change the situation in the country, where all legal
norms were precipitously losing their power?1661
We answer: in hindsight, from great distance, one should not downplay the
significance of what was achieved. Then, the Act suddenly and dramatically
improved the situation of the Jews. As for the rest of the country, falling, with
all its peoples, into an abyss that was the unpredictable way of the history.
The most abrupt and notable change occurred in the judiciary. If earlier, the
Batyushins commission on bribery investigated the business of the obvious
crook D. Rubinstein, now the situation became reversed: the case against
Rubinstein was dropped, and Rubinstein paid a visit to the Extraordinary
Investigatory Commission in the Winter Palace and successfully demanded
prosecution of the Batyushins commission itself. Indeed, in March 1917 they
arrested General Batyushin, Colonel Rezanov, and other investigators. The
investigation of activities of that commission began in April, and, as it turned
out, the extortion of bribes from the bankers and sugar factory owners by them
was apparently significant. Then the safes of Volga-Kama, Siberian, and Junker
banks, previously sealed up by Batyushin, were unsealed and all the documents
returned to the banks. (Semanovich and Manus were not so lucky. When
Simanovich was arrested as secretary to Rasputin, he offered 15,000 rubles to
the prison convoy guards, if they would let him make a phone call, yet the
request was, of course, turned down.1662 As for Manus, suspected of being
involved in shady dealings with the German agent Kolyshko, he battled the
counterintelligence agents who came for him by shooting through his
apartments door. After his arrest, he fled the country). The situation in the
Extraordinary Investigatory Commission of the Provisional Government can be
manifestly traced by records of interrogations in late March. Protopopov was
asked how he came to be appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and in
response he mentioned the directive issued by him: the residence rights of the
Jews were significantly expanded in Moscow. Asked about the priorities of his
Ministry, he first recalled the foodstuffs affair, and, after then the progressive
1660G.B. Slyozberg, Dela Minuvshikh Dney, Volume 3, Page 360
1661B. Orlov, Rossiya byez Yevreev (Russia without Jews) // 22: Obshestvenno-politicheskiy
a literaturniy zhurnal yevreyskoy inteligentsiI iz SSSR v Izrayelye. Tel-Aviv, 1988, No. 60,
Page 157.
1662Rech, March 17, 1917, Page 5
issue the Jewish question. The director of the Department of Police, A.T.
Vasilyev didnt miss an opportunity to inform the interrogators that he helped
defend the sugar factory owners (Jews): Gruzenberg called me in the morning
in my apartment and thanked me for my cooperation; Rosenberg visited
me to thank me for my efforts on his behalf.1663 In this way, the accused tried to
get some leniency for themselves.
A notable aspect of the weeks of March was an energetic pursuit of known
or suspected Judeophobes. The first one arrested, on February 27, was the
Minister of Justice Scheglovitov. He was accused of personally giving the order
to unjustly pursue the case against Beilis. In subsequent days, the Beiliss
accusers, the prosecutor Vipper and Senator Chaplinsky, were also arrested.
(However, they were not charged with anything specific, and in May 1917
Vipper was merely dismissed from his position as the chief prosecutor of the
Criminal Department of the Senate; his fate was sealed later, by the
Bolsheviks). The court investigator Mashkevich was ordered to resign for
during the Beilis trial he had sanctioned not only expert witness testimony
against the argument on the ritual murder, but he also allowed a second expert
testimony arguing for the case of such murder. The Minister of Justice Kerensky
requested transfer of all materials of the Beilis case from the Kiev Regional
Court,1664 planning a loud re-trial, but during the stormy course of 1917 that
didnt happen. The chairman of the Union of the Russian People, Dmitry
Dubrovin, was arrested and his archive was seized; the publishers of the far-
right newspapers Glinka-Yanchevsky and Poluboyarinova were arrested too; the
bookstores of the Monarchist Union were simply burned down.
For two weeks, they hunted for the fugitives N. Markov and Zamyslovsky,
doing nightly searches for two weeks in St. Petersburg, Kiev and Kursk.
Zamislovsky was hunted for his participation in the case against Beilis, and
Markov, obviously, for his speeches in the State Duma. At the same time, they
didnt touch Purishkevich, one assumes, because of his Revolutionary speeches
in the Duma and his participation in the murder of Rasputin. An ugly rumor
arose that Stolypin took part in the murder of Iollos, and in Kremenchuk, a
street that had previously been named after Stolypin was renamed after Iollos.
Over all of Russia there were hundreds of arrests, either because of their
former positions or even because of their former attitudes.
It should be noted that the announcement of Jewish equality did not cause a
single pogrom. It is worth noticing not only for the comparison to 1905, but also
because, all through March and April, all major newspapers were constantly
reporting the preparation of pogroms, and that somewhere, the pogroms had
already supposedly begun.

1663Padeniye Tsarskovo Rezhima (Fall of the Tsarist Regime): Stenographicheskiye otchyoti

doprosov a pokazaniI, dannikh v. 1917 g. v Chryezvichaynoy Sledstvennoy KommissiI
Vremennovo Pravityelstva. L.: GUZ, 1924, T.1. Pages 119-121, 429
1664Russkaya Volya (Russian Will), April 21, 1917, Page 4
 Rumors started on March 5, that somewhere either in Kiev or Poltava
Province, Jewish pogroms were brewing, and someone in Petrograd put up a
hand-written anti-Jewish flyer. As a result, the Executive Committee of Soviet
Workers and Soldiers Deputies formed a special visiting commission led
by Rafes, Aleksandrovich, and Sukhanov. Their task was to delegate
commissars to various towns, with the first priority to go into the regions where
the Black Hundreds, the servants of the old regime, are trying to sow ethnic
antagonism among the population.1665 In the newspaper Izvestia SRSD [Soviet
Workers and Soldiers Deputies] there was an article Incitement to Pogrom: It
would be a huge mistake, tantamount to a crime, to close our eyes to a new
attempt of the overthrown dynasty because it is them [translators note
the Monarchists] who organize the trouble. In Kiev and Poltava provinces,
among the underdeveloped, backwards classes of the population at this moment
there is incitement against Jews. Jews are blamed for the defeats of our Army,
for the revolutionary movement in Russia, and for the fall of the monarchy.
Its an old trick, but all the more dangerous because of its timing. It is
necessary to quickly take decisive measures against the pogrom instigators.1666
After this the commander of the Kiev Military District General Khodorovich
issued an order: all military units are to be on high alert and be ready to prevent
possible anti-Jewish riots.
Long after this, but still in April, in various newspapers, every two or three
days they published rumors of preparations for Jewish pogroms, 1667 or at the
very least, about moving of piles of pogrom literature by railroads. Yet the
most stubborn rumors circulated about a coming pogrom in Kishinev that
was to happen at the end of March, right between the Jewish and (Russian)
Orthodox Passovers, as happened in 1903.
And there were many more such alarming press reports (one even said that
the police in Mogilev was preparing a pogrom near the Headquarters of
Supreme High Command). Not one of these proved true.
One need only get acquainted with the facts of those months, to immerse
oneself in the whole February atmosphere of the defeated Right and the
triumphant Left, of the stupor and confusion of the common folk to dismiss
outright any realistic possibility of anti-Jewish pogroms. But how could
ordinary Jewish residents of Kiev or Odessa forget those horrible days twelve
years before? Their apprehension, their wary caution to any motion in that
direction was absolutely understandable.
The well-informed newspapers were a different story. The alarms raised by
the newspapers, by enlightened leaders of the liberal camp, and half-baked
socialist intellectuals one cannot call this anything except political
provocation. Provocation, however, that fortunately didnt work.
1665Izvestiya Petrogradskovo Sovieta Rabochikh I Soldatskikh Deputatov, (heretofore
Izvestiya), March 6, 1917, Page 4
1666Izvestiya, March 6, Page 2
1667For example: Birzheviye Vedomosti, April 8 and 12, 1917; Russkaya Volya, April 9, 1917;
Izvestiya, April 15, and 28, 1917; et. al.
 One actual episode occurred at the Bessarabian bazaar in Kiev, on April 28:
a girl stole a piece of ribbon in a Jewish shop and ran away; the store clerk
caught up to her and began to beat her. A crowd rushed to lynch the clerk and
the store owner, but the police defended them. In another incident, in the
Rogachevsky district, people, angered by exorbitant prices, smashed the stores
including Jewish ones.
Where and by whom was the Jewish emancipation met with hostility?
Those were our legendary revolutionary Finland, and our powerful ally,
Romania. In Finland (as we learned in Chapter 10 from Jabotinsky) the Jews
were forbidden to reside permanently, and since 1858, only descendants of
Jewish soldiers who served here (in Finland, during the Crimean War) were
allowed to settle. The passport law of 1862 confirmed that Jews were
forbidden entry into Finland, and temporary habitation [was permitted] at the
discretion of a local governor; the Jews could not become Finnish citizens; in
order to get married, a Jew had to go to Russia; the rights of Jews to testify in
Finnish courts were restricted. Several attempts to mitigate the restriction of the
civil rights of the Jews in Finland were not successful. 1668 And now, with the
advent of Jewish equal rights in Russia, Finland, not having yet announced its
complete independence (from Russia), did not legislate Jewish equality.
Moreover, they were deporting Jews who had illegally moved to Finland, and
not in a day, but in an hour, on the next train out. (One such case on March 16
caused quite a splash in the Russian press.) But Finland was always extolled for
helping the revolutionaries, and liberals and socialists stopped short of
criticizing her. Only the Bund sent a wire to very influential Finnish socialists,
reprimanding them that this medieval law was still not repealed. The Bund,
the party of the Jewish proletariat, expresses strong certainty that you will take
out that shameful stain from free Finland. 1669 However, in this certainty, the
Bund was mistaken.
And a huge alarm was raised in the post-February press about the
persecution of Jews in Romania. They wrote that in Jassy it was even forbidden
to speak Yiddish at public meetings. The All-Russian Zionist Student Congress
Gekhover proposed to passionately protest this civil inequality of Jews in
Romania and Finland, which is humiliating to the world Jewry and demeaning
to worldwide democracy.1670 At that time Romania was weakened by major
military defeats. So the Prime Minister Bratianu was making excuses in
Petrograd in April saying that most of the Jews in Romania migrated there
from Russia, and in particular that prompted Romanian government to limit
the political rights of the Jews; he promised equality soon.1671 However, in May

1668Yevreyskaya Encyclopedia (Jewish Encyclopedia): Volume 16 SPB: Obshestvo dlya

Nauchnikh Yevreskikh IzdanniI I Izd-Vo Brokaw-Yefron, 1906-1913. Volume 15, Page
281-284
1669Izvyestiya, March 26, 1917 Page 2
1670Russkaya Volya, April 15, 1917, Page 4
1671Birzheviye Vedomosti, April 23, 1917, Page 3
we read: In fact, nothing is happening in that direction.1672 (In May, the
Romanian communist Rakovsky reported that the situation of the Jews in
Romania is unbearable; the Jews were blamed for the military defeat of the
country; they were accused of fraternizing with Germans in the occupied parts
of the country. If the Romanian government was not afraid [to anger their allies
in the Entente], then one would fear for the very lives of the Jews.)1673
The worldwide response among the allies of the February Revolution was
expressed in a tone of deep satisfaction, even ecstasy among many, but in this
response there was also a short-sighted calculation: that now Russia will
become invincible in war. In Great Britain and the USA there were large
meetings in support of the Revolution and the rights of the Jews. (I wrote about
some of these responses in March 1917 in Chapters 510 and 621). From
America they offered to send a copy of the Statue of Liberty to Russia. (Yet as
the situation in Russia continued to deteriorate, they never got around to the
Statue). On March 9 in the House of Commons of the British Parliament the
Minister of Foreign Affairs was asked a question about the situation of the Jews
in Russia: does he plan to consult with the Russian government regarding
guarantees to the Russian Jews for the future and reparations for the past? The
answer showed the full trust that the British government had for the new
Russian government.1674 From Paris, the president of the International Jewish
Union congratulated [Russian Prime Minister] Prince Lvov, and Lvov
answered: From today onward liberated Russia will be able to respect the
faiths and customs of all of its peoples forever bound by a common religion of
love of their homeland. The newspapers Birzhevka, Rech and many others
reported on the sympathies of Jacob Schiff, a well known leader of North
American circles that are hostile to Russia. He wrote: I was always the enemy
of Russian absolutism, which mercilessly persecuted my co-religionists. Now
let me congratulate the Russian people for this great act which they
committed so perfectly.1675 And now he invites the new Russia to conduct
broad credit operations in America.1676 Indeed, at the time he provided
substantial credit to the Kerensky government. 1677 Later in emigration, the
exiled Russian right-wing press published investigative reports attempting to
show that Schiff actively financed the Revolution itself. Perhaps Schiff shared
the short-sighted Western hope that the liberal revolution in Russia would
strengthen Russia in the war. Still, the known and public acts of Schiff, who had
always been hostile to Russian absolutism, had even greater effect than any
possible secret assistance to such a revolution.

1672ibid, May 19, Page 1

1673Dyen (Day), May 10, 1917
1674Birzheviye Vedomosti, March 11, 1917, Page 2
1675Birzheviye Vedomosti, March 10, 1917, Page 6
1676Rech, March 10, 1917, Page 3
1677Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem, Keter Publishing House, 1971, Volume 14, Page 961
 The February Revolution itself often consciously appealed for support to
Jews, an entire nation enslaved. Eye-witness testimonies that Russian Jews were
very ecstatic about the February Revolution are rife.
Yet there are counter-witnesses too, such as Gregory Aronson, who formed
and led the Soviet of Workers Deputies of Vitebsk (which later had as a
member Y.V. Tarle, a future historian). He wrote that on the very first day, when
news of the Revolution reached Vitebsk, the newly formed Security Council
met in the city Duma, and immediately afterwards Aronson was invited to a
meeting of representatives of the Jewish community (clearly, not rank and file,
but leaders). Apparently, there was a need to consult with me as a
representative of the new dawning era, what to do further. I felt alienation
from these people, from the circle of their interests and from the tense
atmosphere, which was at that meeting. I had a sense that this society
belonged mostly to the old world, which was retreating into the past. 1678 We
were not able to eliminate a certain mutual chill that had come from
somewhere. The faces of the people I was working with, displayed no uplift or
faith. At times, it appeared that these selfless social activists perceived
themselves as elements of the old order.1679
That is a precise witness account. Such bewilderment, caution and
wavering predominated among religiously conservative Jews, one assumes, not
only in Vitebsk. The sensible old Jewry, carrying a sense of many centuries of
experience of hard ordeals, was apparently shocked by the sudden overthrow of
the monarchy and had serious misgivings.
Yet, in the spirit of the 20th century, the dynamic masses of every nation,
including Jews, were already secular, not chained to traditions and very eager to
build the happy new world.
The Jewish Encyclopedia notes a sharp intensification of the political
activity of Jewry, noticeable even against a background of stormy social uplift
that gripped Russia after February 1917.1680
Myself, having worked for many years on the February press and
memoirs of the contemporaries of the February, could not fail to noticed this
sharp strengthening, this gusting. In those materials, from the most varied
witnesses and participants of those events, there are so many Jewish names, and
the Jewish theme is very loud and persistent. From the memories of
Rodzyanko, from the town governor Balk, from General Globachyov and many
others, from the first days of the Revolution in the depths of the Tavrichesky
Palace, the numbers of Jews jumped out at me among the members of the
commandants office, the interrogation commissions, the pamphlet-merchants
and so on. V.D. Nabokov, who was well disposed towards Jews, wrote that on
1678G.Y. Aronson, Intervyu RadiostantsiI Svoboda // Vospominaniya o revolutsiI 1917
goda, Intervyu No. 66, Munchen, 1966, Page 13-14
1679G. Aronson, Revolutsionnaya Yunost: Vospominaniya, 1903-1917 // Inter-University
Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, Paper No. 6, New York, August 1961,
Page 33
1680AJE, T. 7, Page 378
March 2 at the entrance to the Tavrichesky mini-park in front of the Duma
building, there was an unbelievable crush of people and shouting; at the
entrance of the gates some young, Jewish-looking men were questioning the
bypassers.1681 According to Balk, the crowd that went on the rampage at the
Astoria [an elite hotel in St. Petersburg] on the night of February 28,
consisted of armed soldiers, sailors and Jews.1682 I would indulge some
emigrant irritability here as they used to say well, thats all the Jews; yet the
same was witnessed by another neutral observer, the Methodist pastor Dr.
Simons, an American who had already been in Petrograd for ten years and knew
it well. He was debriefed by a commission of the American Senate in 1919:
Soon after the March Revolution of 1917, everywhere in Petrograd you could
see groups of Jews, standing on benches, soap boxes and such, making
speeches. There had been restrictions on the rights of Jews to live in
Petrograd, but after the Revolution they came in droves, and the majority of
agitators were Jews they were apostate Jews.1683
A certain Student Hanokh came to Kronstadt a few days before a planned
massacre of sixty officers, who were named on a hit-list; he became the founder
and chairman of the Kronstadts Committee of the Revolutionary Movement.
(The order of the Committee was to arrest and try each and all officers.
Somebody had carefully prepared and disseminated false information,
triggering massacres first in Kronstadt, then in Sveaborg; it was because of the
uncertainty of the situation, when every fabrication was taken for a hard
fact.1684) The baton of the bloody Kronstadt affair was carried by the drop-out
psychoneurologist Dr. Roshal. (Later, after the October coup, S.G. Roshal was
appointed the Commandant of the Gatchina, and from November he was the
commissar of the whole Romanian Front, where he was killed upon arrival.1685)
A certain Solomon and a Kaplun spoke on behalf of the newly-formed
revolutionary militia of the Vasilievsky Island (in the future, the latter would
become the bloody henchman of Zinoviev).
The Petrograd Bar created a special Commission for the examination of
the justice of imprisoning persons arrested during the time of the Revolution
(thousands were arrested during this time in Petrograd) that is, to virtually
decide their fate without due process (and that of all the former gendarmes and
police). This commission was headed by the barrister Goldstein. Yet, the unique
story of the petty officer Timofey Kirpichnikov, who triggered the street
1681V. Nabokov, Vremennoye Pravitelstvo // Arkhiv Russkoy RevolutsiI, izdavaemiy I.V.
Gessenom. Berlin: Slovo, 1922-1937, Vol. 1, Page 15
1682A. Balk, Posledniye pyat dney tsarskovo Petrograda (23-28 Fevralya 1917) Dnevnik
poslednevo Petrogradskovo Gradonachalnika // Khranenie Guverskovo Instituta,
Mashinopis, Page 16
1683Oktyabrskaya revolutsiya pered sudom amerikanskikh senatorov: Ofitsialniy otchyot
overmenskoy kommissiI Senata. M.;L.; GIZ, 1927 Page 5
1684D.O. Zaslavskiy, Vl. A. Kantorovich. Khronika Fevralskoy revolutsiI, Pg.: Biloye, 1924.
Volume 1, Page 63, 65
1685Rosskiskaya Yevreyskaya Encyclopedia, 2-e izd., ispr. I dop. M., 1995, Volume 2, Page
502
Revolution, was written in March 1917 and preserved for us by the Jew Jacob
Markovich Fishman a curious historical figure. (I with gratitude relied on
this story in The Red Wheel.)
The Jewish Encyclopedia concludes: Jews for the first time in Russian
history had occupied posts in the central and regional administrations.1686
On the very heights, in the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers
and Soldiers Deputies, invisibly ruling the country in those months, two leaders
distinguished themselves: Nakhamkis-Steklov and Gummer-Sukhanov.On the
night of March 1st to March 2nd they dictated to the complacently-blind
Provisional Government a program which preemptively destroyed its power for
the entire period of its existence.
Reflective contemporary G.A. Landau thus explains the active participation
of the Jews in the revolution: The misfortune of Russia, and the misfortune of
the Russian Jewry, is that the results of the first Revolution [1905] were still not
processed, not transformed into a new social fabric; no new generation was
born, when a great and back-breaking war broke out. And when the hour of
disintegration came, it came upon the generation that from the very beginning
was a kind of exhausted remnant of the previous revolution; it found the inertia
of depleted spirituality, lacking an organic connection to the situation, and
chained by spiritual stagnation to the ten-years-ago-bygone period. And so the
organic Revolutionism of the beginning of the 20th century [of the First Russian
Revolution of 1905] had turned into the mechanical `permanent Revolution of
the wartime era.1687
Through many years of detailed studies I have spent much time trying to
comprehend the essence of the February Revolution and the Jewish role in it. I
came to this conclusion and can now repeat: no, the February Revolution was
not something the Jews did to the Russians, but rather it was done by the
Russians themselves, which I believe I amply demonstrated in The Red Wheel.
We committed this downfall ourselves: our anointed Tsar, the court circles, the
hapless high-ranking generals, obtuse administrators, and their enemies the
elite intelligentsia, the Octobrist Party, the Zemstvo, the Kadets, the
Revolutionary Democrats, socialists and revolutionaries, and along with them, a
bandit element of army reservists, distressingly confined to the Petersburgs
barracks. And this is precisely why we perished. True, there were already many
Jews among the intelligentsia by that time, yet that is in no way a basis to call it
a Jewish revolution.
One may classify revolutions by their main animating forces, and then the
February Revolution must be seen as a Russian national Revolution, or more
precisely, a Russian ethnic Revolution. Though if one would judge it using the
methodology of materialistic sociologists asking who benefited the most, or

1686AJE, Volume 7, Page 381

1687G.A. Landau, Revolutsionniye idyee v Yevreyskoy obshestvennosti // RossiI I every: Sb. 1
/ Otechestvennoye obyedinennie russkikh yevreyev za granitsyey. Paris: YMCA Press,
1978, Page 116 [1-e izd. Berlin: Osnova, 1924]
benefited most quickly, or the most solidly and in the long term from the
Revolution, then it could be called otherwise, Jewish, for example. But then
again why not German? After all, Kaiser Wilhelm initially benefited from it. But
the remaining Russian population got nothing but harm and destruction;
however, that doesnt make the Revolution non-Russian. The Jewish society
got everything it fought for from the Revolution, and the October Revolution
was altogether unnecessary for them, except for a small slice of young cutthroat
Jews, who with their Russian internationalist brothers accumulated an explosive
charge of hate for the Russian governing class and burst forth to deepen the
Revolution.
So how, having understood this, was I to move through March 1917 and
then April 1917? Describing the Revolution literally hour by hour, I frequently
found the many episodes in the sources that had a Jewish theme. Yet would it be
right to simply pour all that on the pages of March 1917? Then that easy and
piquant temptation to put all the blame on Jews, on their ideas and actions,
to see them as the main reason for these events would easily skew the book
and overcome the readers, and divert the research away from the truly main
causes of the Revolution.
And so in order to avoid the self-deception of the Russians, I persistently
and purposely downplayed the Jewish theme in The Red Wheel, relative to its
actual coverage in the press and on the streets in those days.
The February Revolution was carried out by Russian hands and Russian
foolishness. Yet at the same time, its ideology was permeated and dominated by
the intransigent hostility to the historical Russian state that ordinary Russians
didnt have, but the Jews had. So the Russian intelligentsia too had adopted
this view. (This was discussed in Chapter 11). This intransigent hostility grew
especially sharp after the trial of Beilis, and then after the mass expulsion of
Jews in 1915. And so this intransigence overcame the moderation.
Yet the Executive Committee of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, which
was formed within hours of the Revolution, appears very different. This
Executive Committee was in fact a tough shadow government that deprived the
liberal Provisional Government of any real power, while at the same time,
criminally refused to accept responsibility for its power openly. By its Order
No. 1, the Executive Committee wrested the power from the military and
created support for itself in the demoralized garrison of Petrograd. It was
precisely this Executive Committee, and not the judiciary, not the timber
industrialists, not the bankers, which fast-tracked the country to her doom. In
the summer of 1917, Joseph Goldenberg, a member of the Executive
Committee explained to the French Diplomat Claude Anet: The Order No. 1
was not a mistake; it was a necessity. On the day we executed the Revolution,
we realized that if we did not destroy the old army, it would crush the
Revolution. We had to choose between the army and the Revolution, and we did
not waver: we chose the latter [and we inflicted,] I dare say, a brilliant
blow.1688 So there you have it. The Executive Committee quite purposely
destroyed the army in the middle of the war.
Is it legitimate to ask who were those successful and fatal-for-Russia
leaders of the Executive Committee? Yes, it is legitimate, when actions of such
leaders abruptly change the course of history. And it must be said that the
composition of the Executive Committee greatly concerned the public and the
newspapers in 1917, during which time many members of the Committee
concealed themselves behind pseudonyms from the public eye: who was ruling
Russia? No one knew.
Then, as it turned out, there was a dozen of soldiers, who were there just
for show and werent very bright, they were kept out of any real power or
decision making. From the other thirty, though, of those who actually wielded
power, more than half were Jewish socialists. There were also Russians,
Caucasians, Latvians and Poles. Less than a quarter were Russians.
The moderate socialist V.B. Stankevich noted: What really stuck out in the
composition of the Committee was the large foreign element totally out of
proportion to their part of the population in Petrograd or the country in general.
Stankevich asks, Was this the unhealthy scum of Russian society? Or was this
the consequence of the sins of the old regime, which by its actions violently
pushed the foreign element into the Leftist parties? Or was that simply the result
of free competition? And then, there remains an open question who bears
more guilt for this the foreign born, who were there, or the Russians who
could have been there but werent?1689
For a socialist that might be a case to look for a guilty party. Yet wouldnt it
better for all for us, for you, for them to avoid sinking into that mad dirty
torrent altogether?

1688Claude Anet, La revolution russe: Juin-Novembre 1917. Paris: Payot et C-ie, 1918, Page
61
1689V.B. Stankevich, Vospominaniya, 1914-1919, Berlin: Izd-vo I.P. Ladizhnikova, 1920, Page
86
 Chapter 14. During 1917

In the beginning of April 1917 the Provisional Government had discovered to

its surprise that Russian finances, already for some time in quite bad shape,
were on the brink of complete collapse. In an attempt to mend the situation, and
stir enthusiastic patriotism, the government loudly, announced the issuance of
domestic Freedom Loan bonds.
Rumors about the loan had began circulating as early as March and
Minister of Finance Tereshchenko informed the press that there were already
multi-million pledges from bankers to buy bonds, mainly from the Jewish
bankers, which is undoubtedly related to the abolition of religious and national
restrictions.1690 Indeed, as soon as the loan was officially announced, names of
large Jewish subscribers began appearing in newspapers, accompanied by
prominent front-page appeals: Jewish citizens! Subscribe to the Freedom
Loan! and Every Jew must have the Freedom Loan bonds! 1691 In a single
subscription drive in a Moscow synagogue 22 million rubles was collected.
During the first two days, Jews in Tiflis subscribed to 1.5 million rubles of
bonds; Jews in Minsk to half a million in the first week; the Saratov
community to 800 thousand rubles of bonds. In Kiev, the heirs of Brodsky and
Klara Ginzburg each spent one million. The Jews abroad came forward as well:
Jacob Schiff, 1 million; Rothschild in London, 1 million; in Paris, on the
initiative of Baron Ginzburg, Russian Jews participated actively and subscribed
to severalmillion worth of bonds.1692 At the same time, the Jewish Committee in
Support for Freedom Loan was established and appealed to public.1693
However, the government was very disappointed with the overall result of
the first month of the subscription. For encouragement, the lists of major
subscribers (who purchased bonds on 25 thousand rubles or more) were
published several times: in the beginning of May, in the beginning of June and
in the end of July. The rich who did not subscribe 1694 were shamed. What is
most striking is not the sheer number of Jewish names on the lists (assimilated
Russian-Germans with their precarious situation during the Russo-German War
1690Delo Naroda, March 25, 1917, p. 3
1691Russkaya Volya, April 14, 1917, p. 1; April 20, p. 1. See also Rech, April 16, 1917, p. 1;
April 20, p. 1.
1692Russkaya Volya, April 23, 1917, p. 4.
1693Birzhevye Vedomosti, May 24, 1917, p. 2.
1694See, for instance, Russkaya Volya, May 10, 1917, p. 5; Birzhevye Vedomosti, May 9, 1917,
p. 5; Birzhevye Vedomosti, June 1, 1917, p. 6; Rech, July 29, 1917, p. 6.
were in the second place among bond-holders) but the near absence of the top
Russian bourgeoisie, apart from a handful of prominent Moscow entrepreneurs.
In politics, left and center parties burgeoned and many Jews had became
politically active.1695 From the very first days after the February Revolution,
central newspapers published an enormous number of announcements about
private meetings, assemblies and sessions of various Jewish parties, initially
mostly the Bund, but later Poale Zion, Zionists, Socialist Zionists, Territorialist
Zionists, and the Socialist Jewish Workers Party (SJWP). By March 7 we
already read about an oncoming assembly of the All-Russian Jewish Congress
finally, the pre-revolutionary idea of Dubnov had become widely accepted.
However, because of sharp differences between Zionists and Bundists, the
Congress did not materialize in 1917 (nor did it occur in 1918 either because
of the Civil War and antagonism of Bolshevik authorities).1696 In Petrograd,
Jewish Peoples Group was re-established with M. Vinaver at the helm.1697
They were liberals, not socialists; initially, they hoped to establish an alliance
with Jewish socialists. Vinaver declared: we applaud the Bund the vanguard
of the revolutionary movement.1698 Yet the socialists stubbornly rejected all
gestures of rapprochement.
The rallying of Jewish parties in Petrograd had indirectly indicated that by
the time of revolution the Jewish population there was already substantial and
energetic. Surprisingly, despite the fact that almost no Jewish proletariat
existed in Petrograd, the Bund was very successful there. It was extraordinarily
active in Petrograd, arranging a number of meetings of local organization (in the
lawyers club and then on April 1 in the Tenishevs school); there was a meeting
with a concert in the Mikhailovsky Theatre; then on April 14-19 the All-
Russian Conference of the Bund took place, at which a demand to establish a
national and cultural Jewish autonomy in Russia was brought forward
again.1699 (After conclusion of speeches, all the conference participants had
sung the Bunds anthem Oath, The Internationale, and La Marseillaise.1700)
And, as in past, Bund had to balance its national and revolutionary platforms: in
1903 it struggled for the independence from the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party, and yet in 1905 it rushed headlong into the All-Russian revolution.
Likewise, now, in 1917, the Bunds representatives occupied prominent
positions in the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers
Deputies [a Soviet is the Russian term used for an elected (at least in theory)

1695Kratkaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforthSJE)].

Jerusalem, 1994. v. 7, p. 399.
1696Ibid., p. 380-381.
1697Ibid., p. 379.
1698G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in
Russia in 1917-1918] // Kniga o russkom evreystve: 1917-1967 [The Book of Russian
Jewry: 1917-1967 (henceforth BRJ-2)]. New York: Association of Russian Jews, 1968, p.
6.
1699SJE, v.7, p. 378.
1700Izvestiya, April 9, 1917, p. 4.
council] and later among the Social Democrats of Kiev. By the end of 1917 the
Bund had nearly 400 sections countrywide, totaling around 40,000
members.1701
Developments in Poale Zion were no less amazing. In the beginning of
April they also held their All-Russian Conference in Moscow. Among its
resolutions we see on the one hand a motion to organize the All-Russian Jewish
Congress and discuss the problem of emigration to Palestine. On the other hand,
the Poale Zion Conference in Odessa had simultaneously announced the partys
uncompromising program of class warfare: Through the efforts of Jewish
revolutionary democracy the power over destinies of the Jewish nation was
wrested from the dirty grasp of wealthy and settled Jews despite all the
resistance of bourgeoisie to the right and the Bund to the left. Do not allow
the bourgeois parties to bring in the garbage of the old order. Do not let the
hypocrites speak they did not fight but sweated out the rights for our people
on their bended knees in the offices of anti-Semitic ministers; they did not
believe in the revolutionary action of the masses. Then, in April 1917, when
the party had split the Radical Socialist Poale Zion moved toward the
Zionists, breaking away from the main Social Democratic Poale Zion, 1702
which later would join the Third International.1703
Like the two above-mentioned parties, the SJWP also held its statewide
conference at which it had merged with the Socialist Zionists, forming the
United Jewish Socialist Workers Party (Fareynikte) and parting with the idea
of any extraterritorial Jewish nation with its own parliament and national
autonomy. Fareynikte appealed to the Provisional Government asking it to
declare equality of languages and to establish a council on the affairs of
nationalities which would specifically fund Jewish schools and public
agencies. At the same time, Fareynikte closely collaborated with the Socialist
Revolutionaries.1704
However, it was Zionism that became the most influential political force in
the Jewish milieu.1705 As early as the beginning of March, the resolution of
Petrograds Zionist Assembly contained the following wording: The Russian
Jewry is called upon to support the Provisional Government in every possible
way, to enthusiastic work, to national consolidation and organization for the
sake of the prosperity of Jewish national life in Russia and the national and
political renaissance of Jewish nation in Palestine. And what an inspiring
historical moment it was March 1917 with the British troops closing on
Jerusalem right at that time! Already on March 19 the proclamation of Odessas
Zionists stated: today is the time when states rearrange themselves on national
foundations. Woe to us if we miss this historic opportunity. In April, the
Zionist movement was strongly reinforced by the public announcement of Jacob
1701SJE, v.7, p. 378-379.
1702SJE, v.7, p. 378.
1703Izvestiya, September 15, 1917, p. 2.
1704SJE, v.6, p. 85; v.7, p. 379.
1705SJE, v.7, p. 378.
Schiff, who had decided to join Zionists because of fear of Jewish assimilation
as a result of Jewish civil equality in Russia. He believes that Palestine could
become the center to spread ideals of Jewish culture all over the world. 1706 In
the beginning of May, Zionists held a large meeting in the building of Petrograd
Stock Exchange, with Zionist hymns performed several times. In the end of
May the All-Russian Zionist Conference was held in the Petrograd
Conservatory. It outlined major Zionist objectives: cultural revival of the Jewish
nation, social revolution in the economic structure of Jewish society to
transform the nation of merchants and artisans into the nation of farmers and
workers, an increase in emigration to Palestine and mobilization of Jewish
capital to finance the Jewish settlers. Both Jabotinskys plan on creation of a
Jewish legion in the British Army and the I. Trumpeldorfs plan for the
formation of a Jewish army in Russia which would cross the Caucasus and
liberate Eretz Yisrael [The land of Israel] from Turkish occupation have been
discussed and rejected on the basis of the neutrality of Zionists in the World War
I.1707
The Zionist Conference decreed to vote during the oncoming local
elections for the parties not farther to the right than the Peoples Socialists,
and even to refuse to support Constitutional Democrats like D. Pasmanik, who
later complained: It was absolutely meaningless it looked like the entire
Russian Jewry, with its petty and large bourgeoisie, are socialists. 1708 His
bewilderment was not unfounded.
The congress of student Zionist organization, Gekhover, with delegates
from 25 cities and all Russian universities, had taken place in the beginning of
April in Petrograd. Their resolution stated that the Jews were suffering not for
the sake of equality in Russia but for the rebirth of Jewish nation in the native
Palestine. They decided to form legions in Russia to conquer Palestine. Overall,
during the summer and fall of 1917 Zionism in Russia continued to gain
strength: by September its members numbered 300,000.1709
It is less known that in 1917 Jewish orthodox movements enjoyed
substantial popularity second only to the Zionists and ahead of the socialist
parties (as illustrated by their success during elections of the leadership of
reorganized Jewish communities).1710
There were rallies (The Jews are together with the democratic Russia in
both love and hatred!), public lectures (The Jewish Question and the Russian
Revolution), city-wide assemblies of Jewish high school students in
Petrograd and other cities (aside from general student meetings). In Petrograd,

1706Birzhevye Vedomosti, April 12, 1917, p. 4.

1707SJE, v.6, p. 463, 464.
1708D. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya? [What are we struggling for?] // Rossiya i evrei:
Otechestvennoe objedinenie russkikh evreev za granitsei [Russia and Jews: Expatriate
Society of Russian Jews in Exile (henceforthRJ)]. Paris, YMCA-Press, 1978, p. 211 [The
1st Edition: Berlin, Osnova, 1924].
1709SJE, v.7, p. 378.
1710Ibid., p. 379.
the Central Organ of Jewish Students was established, though not recognized by
the Bund and other leftist parties. While many provincial committees for the
assistance to the victims of the war (i.e., to Jewish refugees and deportees)
ceased to exist because at this time democratic forces needed to engage in
broader social activities, and so the Central Jewish Committee for providing
such aid was formed by April. In May the Jewish Peoples Union was
established to facilitate consolidation of all Jewish forces, to prepare for the
convocation of the All-Russian Jewish Union and to get ready for the oncoming
elections to the Constituent Assembly. In the end of May there was another
attempt of unification: the steering committee of the Jewish Democratic
Alliance convened the conference of all Jewish democratic organizations in
Russia. Meanwhile, lively public discussion went on regarding convocation of
the All-Russian Jewish Congress: the Bund rejected it as inconsistent with their
plans; the Zionists demanded the Congress include on their agenda the question
of Palestine and were themselves rejected by the rest; in July the All-Russian
Conference on the Jewish Congress preparation took place in Petrograd.1711
Because of social enthusiasm, Vinaver was able to declare there that the idea of
united Jewish nation, dispersed among different countries, is ripe, and that from
now on the Russian Jews may not be indifferent to the situation of Jews in other
countries, such as Romania or Poland. The Congress date was set for December.
What an upsurge of Jewish national energy it was! Even amid the
upheavals of 1917, Jewish social and political activities stood out in their
diversity, vigor and organization.
The period between February and November 1917 was the time of
blossoming of Jewish culture and healthcare. In addition to the Petrograd
publication The Jews of Russia, the publisher of The Jewish Week had moved to
Petrograd; publication of the Petrograd-Torgblat in Yiddish had begun; similar
publications were started in other cities. The Tarbut and Culture League [a
network of secular, Hebrew-language schools] had established dozens of
kindergartens, secondary and high schools and pedagogic colleges teaching
both in Yiddish and in Hebrew. A Jewish grammar school was founded in Kiev.
In April, the first All-Russian Congress on Jewish Culture and Education was
held in Moscow. It requested state funding for Jewish schools A conference of
the Society of Admirers of Jewish Language and Culture took place. The
Habima Theatre, the first professional theatre in Hebrew in the world, 1712
opened in Moscow. There were an exposition of Jewish artists and a conference
of the Society on Jewish Health Care in April in Moscow.
These Jewish activities are all the more amazing given the state of general
governmental, administrative and cultural confusion in Russia 1917.
A major event in the Jewish life of the time was the granting of official
permission for Jewish youth to enlist as officers in the Russian Army. It was a
large-scale move: in April, the headquarters of the Petrograd military district

1711Ibid., p. 380-381.
1712Ibid., p. 379.
had issued an order to the commanders of Guards military units to immediately
post all Jewish students to the training battalion at Nizhny Novgorod with the
purpose of their further assignment to military academies1713 that is virtually
mass-scale promotion of young Jews into the officer ranks. Already in the
beginning of June 1917, 131 Jews graduated from the accelerated military
courses at the Konstantinovsky military academy in Kiev as officers; in the
summer 1917 Odessa, 160 Jewish cadets were promoted into officers. 1714 In
June 2600 Jews were promoted to warrant-officer rank all over Russia.
There is evidence that in some military academies Junkers [used in Tsarist
Russia for cadets and young officers] met Jewish newcomers unkindly, as it was
in the Alexandrovsky military academy after more than 300 Jews had been
posted to it. In the Mikhailovsky military academy a group of Junkers proposed
a resolution that: Although we are not against the Jews in general, we consider
it inconceivable to let them into the command ranks of the Russian Army. The
officers of the academy dissociated themselves from this statement and a group
of socialist Junkers (141-strong) had expressed their disapproval, finding anti-
Jewish protests shameful for the revolutionary army, 1715 and the resolution did
not pass. When Jewish warrant officers arrived to their regiments, they often
encountered mistrust and enmity on the part of soldiers for whom having Jews
as officers was extremely unusual and strange. (Yet the newly-minted officers
who adopted new revolutionary style of behavior gained popularity lightning-
fast.)
On the other hand, the way Jewish Junkers from the military academy in
Odessa behaved was simply striking. In the end of March, 240 Jews had been
accepted into the academy. Barely three weeks later, on April 18 old style, there
was a First of May parade in Odessa and the Jewish Junkers marched
ostentatiously singing ancient Jewish songs. Did they not understand that
Russian soldiers would hardly follow such officers? What kind of officers were
they going to become? It would be fine if they were being prepared for the
separate Jewish battalions. Yet according to General Denikin, the year 1917 saw
successful formation of all kinds of national regiments Polish, Ukrainian,
Transcaucasian (the Latvian units were already in place for a while) except the
Jewish ones: it was the only nationality not demanding national self-
determination in military. And every time, when in response to complaints about
bad acceptance of Jewish officers in army formation of separate Jewish
regiments was suggested, such a proposal was met with a storm of indignation
on the part of Jews and the Left and with accusations of a spiteful
provocation.1716 (Newspapers had reported that Germans also planned to form
separate Jewish regiments but the project was dismissed.) It appears, though,
that new Jewish officers still wanted some national organization in the military.
1713Rech, April 27, 1917, p. 3.
1714SJE, v.7, p. 378.
1715Russkaya Volya, April 25, 1917, p. 5.
1716A. I. Denikin. Ocherki russkoi smuty. V1: Krushenie vlasti I armii, fevral-sentyabr 1917
[Russian Turmoil. Memoirs. V1: Collapse of Authority and Army]. Paris, 1922, p. 129-130.
In Odessa on August 18, the convention of Jewish officers decided to establish a
section which would be responsible for connections between different fronts to
report on the situation of Jewish officers in the field. In August, unions of
Jewish warriors appeared; by October such unions were present at all fronts and
in many garrisons. During the October 10-15, 1917 conference in Kiev, the All-
Russian Union of Jewish Warriors was founded. 1717 (Although it was a new
revolutionary army, some reporters still harbored hostility toward officer corps
in general and to officers epaulettes in particular; for instance, A. Alperovich
whipped up emotions against officers in general in Birzhevye Vedomosti [Stock
Exchange News] as late as May 5.)1718
Various sources indicate that Jews were not eager to be drafted as common
soldiers even in 1917; apparently, there were instances when to avoid the draft
sick individuals passed off as genuine conscripts at the medical examining
boards, and, as a result, some district draft commissions began demanding
photo-IDs from Jewish conscripts (an unusual practice in those simple times). It
immediately triggered angry protests that such a requirement goes against the
repulsion of national restrictions, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs forbade
asking for such IDs.
In the beginning of April the Provisional Government issued an order by
telegraph to free without individual investigation all Jews previously exiled as
suspects of espionage. Some of them resided in the now-occupied territories,
while others could safely return home, and yet many deportees asked for
permission to reside in the cities of the European part of Russia. There was a
flow of Jews into Petrograd (Jewish population of 50,000 in 1917) 1719 and a
sharp increase of Jewish population in Moscow (60,000).1720
Russian Jews received less numerous, but highly energetic reinforcement
from abroad. Take those two famous trains that crossed hostile Germany
without hindrance and brought to Russia nearly 200 prominent individuals, 30
in Lenins and 160 in Natanson-Martovs train, with Jews comprising an
absolute majority (the lists of passengers of the exterritorial trains were for the
first time published by V. Burtsev).1721 They represented almost all Jewish
parties, and virtually all of them would play a substantial role in the future
events in Russia.
Hundreds of Jews returned from the United States: former emigrants,
revolutionaries, and draft escapees now they all were the revolutionary
fighters and victims of Tsarism. By order of Kerensky, the Russian embassy
in the USA issued Russian passports to anyone who could provide just two
witnesses (to testify to identity) literally from the street. (The situation around
Trotskys group was peculiar. They were apprehended in Canada on suspicion of
connections with Germany. The investigation found that Trotsky travelled not
1717SJE, v.7, p. 379.
1718Birzhevye Vedomosti, May 5, 1917, p. 2.
1719SJE, v.4, p. 775.
1720SJE, v.5, p. 475.
1721Obshchee delo, October 14 and 16, 1917
with flimsy Russian papers, but with a solid American passport, inexplicably
granted to him despite his short stay in the USA, and with a substantial sum of
money, the source of which remained a mystery.1722) On June 26 at the exalted
Russian rally in New York City (directed by P. Rutenberg, one-time friend and
then a murderer of Gapon), Abraham Kagan, the editor of Jewish newspaper
Forwards, addressed Russian ambassador Bakhmetev on behalf of two million
Russian Jews residing in the United States of America: We have always loved
our motherland; we have always sensed the links of brotherhood with the entire
Russian nation. Our hearts are loyal to the red banner of the Russian
liberation and to the national tricolor of the free Russia. He had also claimed
that the self-sacrifice of the members of Narodnaya Volya [literally, The
Peoples Will, a terrorist leftwing revolutionary group in Tsarist Russia, best
known for its assassination of Tsar Alexander II, known as the Tsar Liberator
for ending serfdom] was directly connected to the fact of increased persecution
of the Jews and that people like Zundelevich, Deich, Gershuni, Liber and
Abramovich were among the bravest.1723
And so they had begun coming back, and not just from New York, judging
by the official introduction of discounted railroad fare for political emigrants
travelling from Vladivostok. At the late July rally in Whitechapel, London, it
was found that in London alone 10,000 Jews declared their willingness to return
to Russia; the final resolution had expressed pleasure that Jews would go
back to struggle for the new social and democratic Russia.1724
Destinies of many returnees, hurrying to participate in the revolution and
jumping headlong into the thick of things, were outstanding. Among the
returnees were the famous V. Volodarsky, M. Uritsky, and Yu. Larin, the latter
was the author of the War Communism economy program. It is less known
that Yakov Sverdlovs brother, Veniamin, was also among the returnees. Still, he
would not manage to rise higher than the deputy Narkom [Peoples Commissar]
of Communications and a member of Board of the Supreme Soviet of the
National Economy. Moisei Kharitonov, Lenins associate in emigration who
returned to Russia in the same train with him, quickly gained notoriety by
assisting the anarchists in their famous robbery in April; later he was the
secretary of Perm, Saratov and Sverdlov gubkoms [guberniyas Party
committee], and the secretary of Urals Bureau of the Central Committee.
Semyon Dimanshtein, a member of a Bolshevik group in Paris, would become
the head of the Jewish Commissariat at the Peoples Commissariat of
Nationalities, and later the head of YevSek [Jewish Section] at the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee; he would in fact supervise the entire Jewish life.
Amazingly, at the age of 18 he managed to pass qualification test to become a
rabbi and became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party

1722A. Sutton. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Translation from English, Moscow,
1998, p. 14-36.
1723Rech, June 27, 1917, p. 3; June 28, p. 2-3.
1724Rech, August 2, 1917, p. 3.
 all this in course of one year. 1725 Similarly, members of the Trotskys group
had also fared well: the jeweler G. Melnichansky, the accountant Friman, the
typographer A. Minkin-Menson, and the decorator Gomberg-Zorin had
respectively headed Soviet trade unions, Pravda, the dispatch office of bank
notes and securities, and the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal.
Names of other returnees after the February Revolution are now completely
forgotten, yet wrongly so, as they played important roles in the revolutionary
events. For example, the Doctor of Biology Ivan Zalkind had actively
participated in the October coup and then in fact ran Trotskys Peoples
Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Semyon Kogan-Semkov became the political
commissar of Izhevsk weapons and steel factories in November 1918; that is
he was in charge of the vindictive actions during suppression of major uprising
of Izhevsk workers1726 known for its large, in many thousands, victims toll; in a
single incident on the Sobornaya Square in Izhevsk 400 workers were gunned
down.1727 Tobinson-Krasnoshchekov later headed the entire Far East as the
secretary of the Far East Bureau and the head of local government. Girshfeld-
Stashevsky under the pseudonym Verkhovsky was in command of a squad of
German POWs and turncoats, that is, he laid foundation for the Bolshevik
international squads; in 1920 he was the head of clandestine intelligence at the
Western front; later, in peacetime, he, on orders of Cheka Presidium, had
organized intelligence network in the Western Europe; he was awarded the title
of Honorary Chekist.1728
Among returnees were many who did not share Bolshevik views (at least at
the time of arrival) but they were nevertheless welcomed into the ranks of
Lenins and Trotskys party. For instance, although Yakov Fishman, a member
of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the October coup, had deviated
from the Bolshevik mainstream by participating in the Left Socialist
Revolutionary insurrection in July 1918, he was later accepted into the Russian
Communist party of Bolsheviks (RCPB) and entrusted with a post in the
Military Intelligence Administration of the Red Army. Or take Yefim Yarchuk,
who had returned as an Anarchist Syndicalist, but was delegated by the
Petrograd Soviet to reinforce the Kronstadt Soviet; during the October coup he
had brought a squad of sailors to Petrograd to storm the Winter Palace. The
returnee Vsevolod Volin-Eikhenbaum (the brother of the literary scholar) was a
consistent supporter of anarchism and the ideologist of Makhno [a Ukrainian
separatist-anarchist] movement; he was the head of the Revolutionary Military

1725Russkaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforth

RJE)]. 2nd edition, Moscow, 1994 1997. v. 1, p. 240, 427; v. 2, p. 124; v. 3, p. 29, 179,
280.
1726RJE, v. 1, p. 473; v. 3, p. 41.
1727Narodnoe soprotivlenie kommunismu v Rossii: Ural i Prikamye. Noyabr 1917 yanvar
1919 [Peoples Resistance to Communism: Urals and Prikamye. November 1917 January
1919. Redactor M. Bernshtam. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1982, p. 356. Volume 3 of the series
Issledovaniya Noveishei Russkoi istorii [Studies of Modern Russian History].
1728RJE, v. 2, p. 85; v. 3, p. 106.
Soviet in the Makhno army. We know that Makno was more of an advantage
than a detriment to Bolsheviks and as a result Volin was later merely forced to
emigrate together with a dozen of other anarchists.1729
The expectations of returnees were not unfounded: those were the months
marked by a notable rise to prominence for many Jews in Russia. The Jewish
Question exists no longer in Russia.1730 (Still, in the newspaper essay by D.
Aizman, Sura Alperovich, the wife of a merchant who moved from Minsk to
Petrograd, had expressed her doubts: So there is no more slavery and thats it?
So what about the things that Nicholas of yesterday did to us in Kishinev [in
regard to the Kishinev pogrom]?1731) In another article David Aizman thus
elaborated his thought: Jews must secure the gains of revolution by any means
without any qualms. Any necessary sacrifice must be made. Everything is on
the stake here and all will be lost if we hesitate. Even the most backward
parts of Jewish mass understand this. No one questions what would happen to
Jews if the counter-revolution prevails. He was absolutely confident that if that
happens there would be mass executions of Jews. Therefore, the filthy scum
must be crushed even before it had any chance to develop, in embryo. Their
very seed must be destroyed. Jews will be able to defend their freedom.1732
Crushed in embryo. And even their very seed. It was already pretty
much the Bolshevik program, though expressed in the words of Old Testament.
Yet whose seed must be destroyed? Monarchists? But they were already
breathless; all their activists could be counted on fingers. So it could only be
those who had taken a stand against the unbridled, running wild soviets, against
all kinds of committees and mad crowds; those, who wished to halt the
breakdown of life in the country prudent ordinary people, former government
officials, and first of all officers and very soon the soldier-general Kornilov.
There were Jews among those counter-revolutionaries, but overall that
movement was the Russian national one.
What about press? In 1917, the influence of print media grew; the number
of periodicals and associated journalists and staff was rising. Before the
revolution, only a limited number of media workers qualified for draft deferral,
and only those who were associated with newspapers and printing offices which
were established in the pre-war years. (They were classified as defense
enterprises despite their desperate fight against governmental and military
censorship.) But now, from April, on the insistence of the publishers, press
privileges were expanded with respect to the number of workers exempt from
military service; newly founded political newspapers were henceforth also
covered by the exemption (sometimes fraudulently as the only thing needed to
qualify was maintaining a circulation of 30,000 for at least two weeks). Draft
privileges were introduced on the basis of youth, for the political emigrants

1729RJE, v. 3, p. 224, 505; v. 1, p. 239.

1730Rech, June 28, 1917, p. 2.
1731Russkaya Volya, April 13, 1917, p. 3.
1732Russkaya Volya, April 9, 1917, p. 3.
and those released from exile everything that favored employment of new
arrivals in the leftist newspapers. At the same time, rightist newspapers were
being closed: Malenkaya Gazeta [Small Newspaper] and Narodnaya Gazeta
[Peoples Newspaper] were shut down for accusing Bolsheviks of having links
with Germans. When many newspapers published the telegrams fraudulently
attributed to the Empress and the fake was exposed (it was an innocent joke of
a telegraph operator lady, for which, of course, she was never disciplined) and
so they had to retract their pieces, Birzhevye Vedomosti, for instance, had
produced such texts: It turned out that neither the special archive at the Main
Department of Post and Telegraph, where the royal telegrams were stored, nor
the head office of telegraph contain any evidence of this correspondence. 1733
See, they presented it as if the telegrams were real but all traces of their
existence had been skillfully erased. What a brave free press!

As early as in the beginning of March the prudent Vinaver had warned the
Jewish public: Apart from love for freedom, self-control is needed. It is
better for us to avoid highly visible and prominent posts. Do not hurry to
practice our rights.1734 We know that Vinaver (and also Dan, Liber and
Branson) at different times have been offered minister posts, but all of them
refused, believing that Jews should not be present in Russian Government. The
attorney Vinaver could not, of course, reject his sensational appointment to the
Senate, where he became one of four Jewish Senators (together with G.
Blumenfeld, O. Gruzenberg, and I. Gurevich).1735 There were no Jews among
the ministers but four influential Jews occupied posts of deputy ministers: V.
Gurevich was a deputy to Avksentiev, the Minister of Internal Affairs; S. Lurie
was in the Ministry of Trade and Industry; S. Schwartz and A. Ginzburg-
Naumov in the ministry of Labor; and P. Rutenberg should be mentioned here
too. From July, A. Galpern became the chief of the administration of the
Provisional Government (after V. Nabokov)1736; the director of 1st Department
in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was A. N. Mandelshtam. The assistant to the
head of the Moscow military district was Second Lieutenant Sher (since July
1917); from May, the head of foreign supply department at General Staff was A.
Mikhelson; the commissar of the Provisional Government in the field
construction office was Naum Glazberg; several Jews were incorporated by
Chernov into the Central Land Committee responsible for everything related to
allotting land to peasants. Of course, most of those were not key posts, having
negligibly small influence when compared to the principal role of the Executive

1733Birzhevye vedomosti, May 7, 1917, p. 3.

1734G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in
Russia in 1917-1918]. // BRJ-2, p. 7.
1735RJE, v. 7, p. 381.
1736Ibid.
Committee, whose ethnic composition would soon become a hotly debated
public worry.
At the August Government Conference dedicated to the disturbing situation
in the country, apart from the representatives of soviets, parties, and guilds, a
separate representation was granted to the ethnic groups of Russia, with Jews
represented by eight delegates, including G. Sliozberg, M. Liber, N. Fridman, G.
Landau, and O. Gruzenberg.
The favorite slogan of 1917 was Expand the Revolution! All socialist
parties worked to implement it. I. O. Levin writes: There is no doubt that
Jewish representation in the Bolshevik and other parties which facilitated
expanding of revolution Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc. with
respect to both general Jewish membership and Jewish presence among the
leaders, greatly exceeds the Jewish share in the population of Russia. This is an
indisputable fact; while its reasons should be debated, its factual veracity is
unchallengeable and its denial is pointless; and a certainly convincing
explanation of this phenomenon by Jewish inequality before the March
revolution is still not sufficiently exhaustive. 1737 Members of central
committees of the socialist parties are known. Interestingly, Jewish
representation in the leadership of Mensheviks, the Right and the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries, and the Anarchists was much greater than among the
Bolshevik leaders. At the Socialist Revolutionary Congress, which took place in
the end of May and beginning of June 1917, 39 out of 318 delegates were
Jewish, and out of 20 members of the Central Committee of the party elected
during the Congress, 7 were Jewish. A. Gotz was one of the leaders of the right
wing faction and M. Natanson was among the leaders of the left Socialist
Revolutionaries.1738 (What a despicable role awaited Natanson, the wise
Mark, one of the founder of Russian Narodnichestvo [Populism]! During the
war, living abroad, he was receiving financial aid from Germany. In May 1917
he returned in Russia in one of the extraterritorial trains across Germany; in
Russia, he had immediately endorsed Lenin and threw his weight in support of
the latters goal of dissolving the Constituent Assembly; actually, it was he who
had voiced this idea first, though Lenin, of course, needed no such nudge.)
Local government elections took place in the summer. Overall, socialist
parties were victorious, and Jews actively participated in the local and
municipal work in a number of cities and towns outside of the [former] Pale of
Settlement. For instance, Socialist Revolutionary O. Minor .became head of
the Moscow City Duma; member of the Central Committee of the Bund, A.
Vainshtein (Rakhmiel),of the Minsk Duma; Menshevik I. Polonsky, of the
Ekaterinoslav Duma, Bundist D. Chertkov, of the Saratov Duma. G. Shreider
had become the mayor of Petrograd, and A. Ginzburg-Naumov was elected a
deputy mayor in Kiev.1739

1737I. O. Levin. Evrei v revolutsii [The Jews in the Revolution]. // RJ, p. 124.
1738RJE, v. 7, p. 399.
 But most of these persons were gone with the October coup and it was not
they who shaped the subsequent developments in Russia. It would become the
lot of those who now occupied much lower posts, mostly in the soviets; they
were numerous and spread all over the country: take, for instance, Khinchuk,
head of the Moscow Soviet of Workers Deputies, or Nasimovich and M.
Trilisser of the Irkutsk Soviet (the latter would later serve in the Central
Executive Committee of the Soviets of Siberia and become a famous
Chekist).1740
All over the provinces Jewish socialist parties enjoyed large representation
in the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies.1741 They were also
prominently presented at the All-Russian Democratic Conference in September
1917, which annoyed Lenin so much that he had even demanded surrounding
the Alexandrinsky Theater with troops and arresting the entire assembly. (The
theaters superintendent, comrade Nashatyr, would have to act on the order, but
Trotsky had dissuaded Lenin.) And even after the October coup, the Moscow
Soviet of Soldiers Deputies had among its members, according to Bukharin,
dentists, pharmacists, etc., representatives of trades as close to the soldiers
profession as to that of the Chinese Emperor.1742
But above all of that, above all of Russia, from the spring to the autumn of
1917, stood the power of one body and it was not the Provisional
Government. It was the powerful and insular Executive Committee of the
Petrograd Soviet, and later, after June, the successor to its power, the All-
Russian Central Executive Committee (CEC) it was they who had in fact
ruled over Russia. While appearing solid and determined from outside, in reality
they were being torn apart by internal contradictions and inter-factional
ideological confusion. Initially, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd
Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies unanimously approved the Order No.
1, but later was doubtful about the war whether to continue destroying army
or to strengthen it. (Quite unexpectedly, they declared their support for the
Freedom Loan; thus they had incensed the Bolsheviks but agreed with the
public opinion on this issue, including the attitudes of liberal Jews.)
The Presidium of the first All-Russian CEC of the Soviet of Workers and
Soldiers Deputies (the first governing Soviet body) consisted of nine men.
Among them were the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) A. Gots and M.
Gendelman, the Menshevik, F. Dan, and the member of Bund, M. Liber. (In
March at the All-Russian Conference of the Soviets, Gendelman and Steklov
had demanded stricter conditions be imposed on the Tsars family, which was
under house arrest, and also insisted on the arrest of all crown princes this is
how confident they were in their power.) The prominent Bolshevik, L.
1739G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in
Russia in 1917-1918] // BRJ-2, p. 10. RJE, v. 7, p. 381.
1740RJE, v. 3, p. 162, 293.
1741G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in
Russia in 1917-1918] // BRJ-2, p. 7.
1742Izvestiya, November 8, 1917, p. 5.
Kamenev, was among the members of that Presidium. It also included the
Georgian, Chkheidze; the Armenian, Saakjan; one Krushinsky, most likely a
Pole; and Nikolsky, likely a Russian quite an impudent [ethnic] composition
for the governing organ of Russia in such a critical time.
Apart from the CEC of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, there
was also the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants
Deputies, elected in the end of May. Of its 30 members, there were only three
actual peasants an already habitual sham of the pre-Bolshevik regime. Of
those thirty, D. Pasmanik identified seven Jews: a sad thing it was, especially
considering Jewish interests; and they had become an eyesore to
everybody.1743 Then this peasant organ put forward a list of its candidates for
the future Constituent Assembly. Apart from Kerensky, the list contained several
Jews, such as the boisterous Ilya Rubanovich, who had just arrived from Paris,
the terrorist Abram Gots, and the little-known Gurevich 1744 (In the same
article, there was a report on the arrest for desertion of warrant officer M.
Golman, the head of the Mogilev Guberniya, a Peasant Soviet.1745)
Of course, the actions of the executive committees could not be solely
explained by their ethnic composition not at all! (Many of those personalities
irreversibly distanced themselves from their native communities and had even
forgotten the way to their shtetls.) All of them sincerely believed that because of
their talents and revolutionary spirit, they would have no problem arranging
workers, soldiers and peasants matters in the best way possible. They would
manage it better simply because of being more educated and smarter than all
this clumsy hoi polloi.
Yet for many Russians, from commoner toa general, this sudden, eye-
striking transformation in the appearance among the directors and orators at
rallies and meetings, in command and in government, was overwhelming.
V. Stankevich, the only officer-socialist in the Executive Committee,
provided an example: this fact [of the abundance of Jews in the Committee]
alone had enormous influence on the public opinion and sympathies.
Noteworthy, when Kornilov met with the Committee for the first time, he had
accidently sat in the midst of Jews; in front of him sat two insignificant and
plain members of the Committee, whom I remember merely because of their
grotesquely Jewish facial features. Who knows how that affected Kornilovs
attitudes toward Russian revolution?1746
Yet the treatment of all things Russian by the new regime was very tale-
telling. Here is an example from the days of Kornilov in the end of August
1918. Russia was visibly dying, losing the war, with its army corrupted and the

1743D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaya revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian

Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 153-154.
1744Rech, July 28, 1917, p. 3.
1745Ibid.; see also G. Lelevich. Oktyabr v stavke [The October in the general Headquarters].
Gomel, 1922, p. 13, 66-67.
1746V. B. Stankevich. Vospominaniya, 1914-1919 [Memoirs, 1914-1919]. Berlin, publishing
house of I. P. Ladyzhnikov, 1920, p. 86-87.
rear in collapse. General Kornilov, cunningly deceived by Kerensky, artlessly
appealed to the people, almost howling with pain: Russian people! Our great
Motherland is dying. The hour of her death is nigh. All, whose bosoms harbor
a beating Russian heart, go to the temples and pray to God to grant us the
greatest miracle of salvation for our beloved country!1747 In response to that the
ideologist of the February Revolution and one of the leading members of the
Executive Committee, Gimmer-Sukhanov, chuckled in amusement: What an
awkward, silly, clueless, politically illiterate call what a lowbrow imitation of
Suzdalshchina [Suzdalshchina refers to resistance in Suzdal to the Mongol
invaders]!1748
Yes, it sounded pompously and awkwardly, without a clear political
position. Indeed, Kornilov was not a politician but his heart ached. And what
about Sukhanovs heart did he feel any pain at all? He did not have any sense
of the living land and culture, nor he had any urge to preserve them he served
to his ideology only, the International, seeing in Kornilovs words a total lack of
ideological content. Yes, his response was caustic. But note that he had not only
labeled Kornilovs appeal an imitation, he had also derogatorily referred to
Suzdalshchina, to Russian history, ancient art and sanctity. And with such
disdain to the entire Russian historical heritage, all that internationalist ilk
Sukhanov and his henchmen from the malicious Executive Committee, steered
the February Revolution.
And it was not the ethnic origin of Sukhanov and the rest; it was their anti-
national, anti-Russian and anti-conservative attitudes. We have seen similar
attitudes on the part of the Provisional Government too, with its task of
governing the entire Russia and its quite Russian ethnic composition. Yet did it
display a Russian worldview or represent Russian interests if only a little? Not
at all! The Governments most consistent and patriotic activity was to guide
the already unraveling country (the Kronstadt Republic was not the only place
which had seceded from Russia by that time) to the victory in war! To the
victory at any cost! With loyalty to the allies! (Sure, the allies, their
governments, public and financers, put pressure on Russia. For instance, in
May, Russian newspapers cited The Morning Post from Washington: America
made it clear to the Russian government that if [Russia] makes a separate
peace [with Germany], the United States would annul all financial agreements
with Russia.1749 Prince Lvov [Prince Georgi Lvov, led the Russian Provisional
Government during the Russian revolutions initial phase, from March 1917
until he relinquished control to Alexander Kerensky in July 1917] upheld the
sentiment: The country must determinately send its army to battle. 1750) They
had no concern about consequences of the ongoing war for Russia. And this
1747A. I. Denikin. Ocherki russkoi smuty. V1: Krushenie vlasti I armii, fevral-sentyabr 1917
[Russian Turmoil. Memoirs. V1: Collapse of Authority and Army]. Paris, 1922, p. 216.
1748Nik Sukhanov. Zapiski o revolutsii [Memoirs of the Revolution]. Berlin, Publishing House
of Z. I. Grzhebin, 1923, v.5, p. 287.
1749Russkaya Volya, May 7, 1917, p. 4.
1750Ibid., p. 6.
mismatch, this loss of sense of national self-preservation, could be observed
almost at every meeting of the Provisional Government cabinet, almost in every
discussion.
There were simply ridiculous incidents. Throwing millions of rubles left
and right and always keenly supporting cultural needs of ethnic minorities,
the Provisional Government at its April 6 meeting had rejected the request of
the long-established Great Russian Orchestra of V. V. Andreev to continue
getting paid as before, from the funds of the former His Majestys Personal
Chancellery (the funds were confiscated by the Provisional Government itself).
The petition was turned down despite the fact that the requested sum, 30
thousand rubles per year, was equivalent to the annual pay of just three minister
assistants. Deny! (Why not disband your so-called Great Russian orchestra?
What kind of name is that?) Taken aback and believing that it was just a
misunderstanding, Andreev petitioned again. Yet with an unusual for this torpid
government determination, he was refused a second time too, at the April 27
meeting.1751
Milyukov, a Russian historian and minister of the Provisional Government,
did not utter a single specifically Russian sentiment during that year. Similarly,
the key figure of the revolution, Alexander Kerensky, could not be at any
stage accused of possessing an ethnic Russian consciousness. Yet at the same
time the government demonstrated constant anxious bias against any
conservative circles, and especially against Russian conservatives. Even
during his last speech in the Council of the Russian Republic (Pre-Parliament)
on October 24, when Trotskys troops were already seizing Petrograd building
after building, Kerensky emphatically argued that the Bolshevik newspaper
Rabochy Put (Workers Way) and the right-wing Novaya Rus (New Russia)
both of which Kerensky had just shut down shared similar political views.

The darned incognito of the members of the Executive Committee was, of

course, noticed by the public. Initially it was the educated society of Petrograd
that was obsessed with this question, which several times surfaced in
newspapers. For two months, the Committee tried to keep the secret, but by
May they had no other choice but reveal themselves and had published the
actual names of most of the pseudonym-holders (except for Steklov-Nakhamkis
and Boris Osipovich Bogdanov, the energetic permanent chair of the council;
they had managed to keep their identities secret for a while; the latters name
confused the public by similarity with another personality, Bogdanov-
Malinovsky). This odd secrecy irritated the public, and even ordinary citizens
began asking questions. It was already typical in May that if, during a plenary

1751Zhurnaly zasedanii Vremennogo Pravitelstva [Minutes of the meetings of the Provisional

Government]. Petrograd, 1917. V1: March-May; April 6 meeting (book 44, p. 5) and April
27 meeting (book 64, p. 4).
meeting of the Soviet, someone proposed Zinoviev or Kamenev for something,
the public shouted from the auditorium demanding their true names.
Concealing true names was incomprehensible to the ordinary man of that
time: only thieves hide and change their names. Why is Boris Katz ashamed of
his name, and instead calling himself Kamkov? Why does Lurie hide under
the alias of Larin? Why does Mandelshtam use the pseudonym Lyadov?
Many of these had aliases that originated out of necessity in their past
underground life , but what had compelled the likes of Shotman, the Socialist
Revolutionary from Tomsk, (and not him alone) to become Danilov in 1917?
Certainly, the goal of a revolutionary, hiding behind a pseudonym, is to
outsmart someone, and that may include not only the police and government. In
this way, ordinary people as well are unable to figure out who their new leaders
are.
Intoxicated by the freedom of the first months of the February Revolution,
many Jewish activists and orators failed to notice that their constant fussing
around presidiums and rallies produced certain bewilderment and wry glances.
By the time of the February Revolution there was no popular anti-Semitism in
the internal regions of Russia, it was confined exclusively to the areas of the
Pale of Settlement. (For instance, Abraham Cogan had even stated in 1917: We
loved Russia despite all the oppression from the previous regime because we
knew that it was not the Russian people behind it but Tsarism. 1752) But after
just a few months following the February Revolution, resentment against Jews
had suddenly flared up among the masses of people and spread over Russia,
growing stronger with each passing month. And even the official newspapers
reported, for instance, on the exasperation in the waiting lines in the cities.
Everything has been changed in that twinkle of the eye that created a chasm
between the old and the new Russia. But it is queues that have changed the
most. Strangely, while everything has moved to the left, the food lines have
moved to the right. If you would like to hear Black Hundred propaganda
then go and spend some time in a waiting line. Among other things you will
find out that there are virtually no Jews in the lines, they dont need it as they
have enough bread hoarded. The same gossip about Jews who tuck away
bread rolls from another end of the line as well; the waiting lines is the most
dangerous source of counterrevolution.1753 The author Ivan Nazhivin noted that
in the autumn in Moscow anti-Semitic propaganda fell on ready ears in the
hungry revolutionary queues: What rascals! They wormed themselves onto
the very top! See, how proudly they ride in their cars. Sure, not a single
Yid can be found in the lines here. Just you wait!1754
Any revolution releases a flood of obscenity, envy, and anger from the
people. The same happened among the Russian people, with their weakened
Christian spirituality. And so the Jews many of whom had ascended to the top,

1752Rech, June 28, 1917, p. 2.

1753Rech, May 3, 1917, p. 6.
1754Ivan Nazhivin. Zapiski o revolutsii [Notes about Revolution]. Vienna, 1921, p. 28.
to visibility, and, what is more, who had not concealed their revolutionary
jubilation, nor waited in the miserable lines increasingly became a target of
popular resentment.
Many instances of such resentment were documented in 1917 newspapers.
Below are several examples. When, at the Apraksin market on Sennaya Square,
a hoard of goods was discovered in possession of Jewish merchants, people
began shout plunder Jewish shops!, because Yids are responsible for all
the troubles and this word Yid is on everyones lips. 1755 A stockpile of
flour and bacon was found in the store of a merchant (likely a Jew) in Poltava.
The crowd started plundering his shop and then began calling for a Jewish
pogrom. Later, several members of the Soviet of Workers Deputies, including
Drobnis, arrived and attempted to appease the crowd; as a result, Drobnis was
beaten.1756 In October in Ekaterinoslav soldiers trashed small shops, shouting
Smash the bourgeois! Smash the Yids! In Kiev at the Vladimirsky market a
boy had hit a woman, who tried to buy flour out her turn on the head Instantly,
the crowd started yelling the Yids are beating the Russians! and a brawl
ensued. (Note that it had happened in the same Kiev where one could already
see the streamers Long live free Ukraine without Yids and Poles!) By that
time Smash the Yids! could be heard in almost every street brawl, even in
Petrograd, and often completely without foundation. For instance, in a
Petrograd streetcar two women called for disbanding of the Soviet of Workers
and Soldiers Deputies, filled, according to them, exclusively by Germans and
Yids. Both were arrested and called to account.1757
Newspaper Russkaya Volya (Russian Freedom) reported: Right in front of
our eyes, anti-Semitism, in its most primitive form re-arises and spreads. It
is enough to hear to conversations in streetcars [in Petrograd] or in waiting lines
to various shops, or in the countless fleeting rallies at every corner and
crossroad they accuse Jews of political stranglehold, of seizing parties and
soviets, and even of ruining the army of looting and hoarding goods.1758
Many Jewish socialists, agitators in the front units, enjoyed unlimited
success during the spring months when calls for a democratic peace were
tolerated and fighting was not required. Then nobody blamed them for being
Jewish. But in June when the policy of the Executive Committee had changed
toward support and even propaganda for the offensive, calls of smash the
Yids! began appearing and those Jewish persuaders suffered battering by
unruly soldiers time and time again.
Rumors were spreading that the Executive Committee in Petrograd was
seized by Yids. By June this belief had taken root in the Petrograd garrison
and factories; this is exactly what soldiers shouted to the member of the

1755Rech, June 17, 1917, evening issue, p. 4.

1756Rech, September 9, 1917, p. 3.
1757Rech, August 8, 1917, p. 5.
1758Russkaya Volya, June 17, 1917, evening issue, p. 4.
Committee Voitinsky who had visited an infantry regiment to dissuade the
troops from the looming demonstration conceived by Bolsheviks on June 10.
V. D. Nabokov, hardly known for anti-Semitism, joked that the meeting of
the foremen of the Pre-Parliament in October 1917 could be safely called a
Sanhedrin: its majority was Jewish; of Russians, there were only Avksentiev,
me, Peshekhonov, and Chaikovsky. His attention was drawn to that fact by
Mark Vishnyak who was present there also.1759
By autumn, the activity of Jews in power had created such an effect that
even Iskry (Sparks), the illustrated supplement to the surpassingly gentle
Russkoe Slovo (Russian Word) that would until then never dare defying public
opinion in such a way, had published an abrasive anti-Jewish caricature in the
October 29 issue, that is, already during fights of the October coup in Moscow.
The Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies
actively fought against anti-Semitism. (I cannot rule out that the harsh refusal to
accept the well-deserved Plekhanov into the CEC in April 1917 was a kind of
revenge for his anti-Bund referral to the tribe of Gad, which was mentioned in
Lenins publications.1760 Indeed, I cannot provide any other explanation.) On
July 21 the 1st All-Russian Congress of Soviets had issued a proclamation about
a struggle against anti-Semitism (about the only resolution approved by the
Congress unanimously, without any objections or arguments1761). When in the
end of June (28th and 29th) the re-elected Bureau of the CEC had assembled,
they had heard a report on the rise of anti-Semitic agitation mainly in the
northwestern and southwestern guberniyas; a decision was made immediately
to send a delegation of 15 members of the CEC with special powers there1762,
subordinating them to the direction of the Department on the Struggle against
Counter-Revolution.
On the other hand, Bolsheviks, who advanced their agenda under the
slogan Down with the ministers-capitalists! not only did nothing to alleviate
this problem, they even fanned its flames (along with the anarchists, despite the
fact that the latter were headed by one Bleikhman). They claimed that the
Executive Committee was so exceptionally lenient toward the government only
because capitalists and Jews control everything (isnt that reminiscent of
Narodnaya Volya [the Peoples Will terrorist organization] of 1881?).
And when the Bolshevik uprising of July 3-4 broke out (it was in fact
targeted not against the already impotent Provisional Government but against
the Bolsheviks true competitor Executive Committee), the Bolsheviks slyly
exploited the anger of soldiers toward Jews by pointing them to that very body
see, there they are!

1759V. Nabokov. Vremennoye pravitelstvo [The Provisional Government] // Archive of Russian

Revolution, published by Gessen. Berlin: Slovo, 1922, v. 1, p. 80.
1760V. I. Lenin. Sochineniya [Works]. In 45 volumes, 4th Edition (henceforth Lenin, 4th
edition). Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1941-1967, v. 4, p. 311.
1761Izvestiya, June 28, 1917, p. 5.
1762Izvestiya, June 30, 1917, p. 10.
 But when the Bolsheviks had lost their uprising, the CEC had conducted an
official investigation and many members of the commission of inquiry were
Jews from the presidium of the CEC. And because of their socialist
conscience they dared not call the Bolshevik uprising a crime and deal with it
accordingly. So the commission had yielded no result and was soon liquidated.
During the garrison meeting, arranged by the CEC on October 19, just
before the decisive Bolshevik uprising, one of representatives of 176th Infantry
Regiment, a Jew, warned that those people down on the streets scream that
Jews are responsible for all the wrongs.1763 At the CEC meeting during the
night of October 25, Gendelman reported that when he was giving a speech in
the Peter and Paul Fortress earlier that afternoon he was taunted: You are
Gendelman! That is you are a Yid and a Rightist!1764 When on October 27 Gotz
and his delegation to Kerensky tried to depart to Gatchina from the Baltiysky
Rail Terminal, he was nearly killed by sailors who screamed that the soviets
are controlled by Yids.1765 And during the wine pogroms on the eve of the
glorious Bolshevik victory, the calls Slaughter Yids! were heard also.
And yet there was not a single Jewish pogrom over the whole year of 1917.
The infamous outrageous pogroms in Kalusha and Ternopol were in fact the
work of frenzied drunken revolutionary soldiers, retreating in disorder. They
smashed everything on their way, all shops and stores; and because most of
those were Jewish-owned, the word spread about Jewish pogroms. A similar
pogrom took place in Stanislavov, with its much smaller Jewish population, and
quite reasonably it was not labeled a Jewish pogrom.
Already by the mid-summer of 1917 the Jews felt threatened by the
embittered population (or drunken soldiers), but the ongoing collapse of the
state was fraught with incomparably greater dangers. Amazingly, it seems that
both the Jewish community and the press, the latter to a large extent identified
with the former, learned nothing from the formidable experiences of 1917 in
general, but narrowly looked at the isolated manifestations of pogroms. And
so time after time they missed the real danger. The executive power behaved
similarly. When the Germans breached the front at Ternopol in the night of July
10, the desperate joint meeting of the CEC of the Soviet of Workers and
Soldiers Deputies and the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants
Deputies had taken place. They had acknowledged that should the revolution
perish, the country crumbles down (in that exact order), and then named
Provisional Government a Government for Salvation of the Revolution, and
noted in their appeal to the people that dark forces are again prepared to
torment our longsuffering Motherland. They are setting backward masses upon
the Jews.1766

1763Rech, October 20, 1917, p. 3.

1764Izvestiya, October 26, 1917, p. 2.
1765Delo Naroda, October 29, 1917, p. 1.
1766Rech, July 11, 1917, p. 3.
 On July 18 at a panel session of the State Duma, in an extremely small
circle, Rep. Maslennikov spoke against the Executive Committee and among
other things spelled out the real names of its members. On the very same
evening at the factional meeting of the CEC they beat an alarm: This is a case
of counterrevolution, it must be dealt with according to the recently issued
decree of the Minister of Internal Affairs Tsereteli on suppression of
counterrevolution! (The decree was issued in response to the Bolshevik
uprising, though it was never used against Bolsheviks.) In two days
Maslennikov made excuses in an article in the newspaper Rech [Speech]:
indeed, he named Steklov, Kamenev, and Trotsky but never intended to incite
anger against the entire Jewish people, and anyway, attacking them, I had
absolutely no wish to make Jewish people responsible for the actions of these
individuals.1767
Then, in mid-September, when the all gains of the February Revolution
were already irreversibly ruined, on the eve of the by now imminent Bolshevik
coup, Ya. Kantorovich warned in Rech about the danger that: The dark forces
and evil geniuses of Russia will soon emerge from their dens to jubilantly
perform Black Masses. Indeed, it will happen soon. Yet what kind of Black
masses? Of bestial patriotism and pogrom-loving truly-Russian national
identity.1768 In October in Petrograd I. Trumpeldor had organized Jewish self-
defense forces for protection against pogroms, but they were never needed.
Indeed, Russian minds were confused, and so were Jewish ones.
Several years after the revolution, G. Landau, looking back with sadness,
wrote: Jewish participation in the Russian turmoil had astonishingly suicidal
overtones in it; I am referring not only to their role in Bolshevism, but to their
involvement in the whole thing. And it is not just about the huge number of
politically active people, socialists and revolutionaries, who have joined the
revolution; I am talking mainly about the broad sympathy of the masses it was
met with. Although many harbored pessimistic expectations, in particular, an
anticipation of pogroms, they were still able to reconcile such a foreboding with
an acceptance of turmoil which unleashed countless miseries and pogroms. It
resembled the fatal attraction of butterflies to fire, to the annihilating fire. It is
certain there were some strong motives pushing the Jews into that direction, and
yet those were clearly suicidal. Granted, Jews were not different in that from
the rest of Russian intelligentsia and from the Russian society. Yet we had to
be different we, the ancient people of city-dwellers, merchants, artisans,
intellectuals we had to be different from the people of land and power, from
peasants, landowners, officials.1769
And lets not forget those who were different. We must always remember
that Jewry was and is very heterogeneous, that attitudes and actions vary greatly

1767Rech, July 21, 1917, p. 4.

1768Rech, September 16, 1917, p. 3.
1769G. A. Landau. Revolutsionnye idei v evreiskoi obchshestvennosti [Revolutionary ideas in
Jewish society] // RJ, p. 105, 106.
among the Jews. So it was with the Russian Jewry in 1917: in provinces and
even in the capital there were circles with reasonable views and they were
growing as October was getting closer.
The Jewish stance toward Russian unity during the months when Russia
was pulled apart not only by other nations, but even by Siberians, was
remarkable. All over the course of revolution Jews, together with Great
Russians, were among the most ardent champions of the idea of Great
Russia.1770 Now, when Jews had gotten their equal rights, what could they have
in common with different peoples on the periphery of the former empire? And
yet the disintegration of a united country would fracture Jewry. In July at the 9th
Congress of Constitutional Democrats, Vinaver and Nolde openly argued
against territorial partition of peoples and in favor of Russian unity.1771 Also in
September, in the national section of the Democratic Conference, the Jewish
socialists spoke against any federalization of Russia (in that they had joined the
Centralists). Today they write in an Israeli magazine that Trumpeldors Jewish
detachments backed the Provisional Government and had even foiled the
Kornilovs mutiny.1772 Perhaps. However, in rigorously studying events of
1917, I did not encounter any such information. But I am aware of opposite
instances: in early May 1917 in the thundering patriotic and essentially counter-
revolutionary Black Sea Delegation, the most successful orator calling for the
defense of Russia was Jewish sailor Batkin.
D. Pasmanik had published the letters of millionaire steamship owner
Shulim Bespalov to the Minister of Trade and Industry Shakhovsky dated as
early as September 1915: Excessive profits made by all industrialists and
traders lead our Motherland to the imminent wreck. He had donated half a
million rubles to the state and proposed to establish a law limiting all profits by
15%. Unfortunately, these self-restricting measures were not introduced as rush
to freedom progressives, such as Konovalov and Ryabushinsky, did not mind
making 100% war profits. When Konovalov himself became the Minister of
Trade and Industry, Shulim Bespalov wrote to him on July 5, 1917: Excessive
profits of industrialists are ruining our country, now we must take 50% of the
value of their capitals and property, and added that he is ready to part with 50%
of his own assets. Konovalov paid no heed.1773
In August, at the Moscow All-Russian State Conference, O. O. Gruzenberg
(a future member of the Constituent Assembly) stated: These days the Jewish
people are united in their allegiance to our Motherland, in unanimous

1770D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaya revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian

Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 245.
1771Rech, July 26, 1917, p. 3.
1772I. Eldad. Tak kto zhe nasledniki Zhabotinskogo? [So Who Are the Heirs of Jabotinsky?] //
22: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR
v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR
in Israel (henceforth 22)]. Tel-Aviv, 1980, (16), p. 120.
1773D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaya revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian
Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 179-181.
aspiration to defend her integrity and achievements of democracy and were
prepared to give for her defense all their material and intellectual assets, to part
with everything precious, with the flower of their people, all their young.1774
These words reflected the realization that the February regime was the best
for the Russian Jewry, promising economic progress as well as political and
cultural prosperity. And that realization was adequate.
The closer it got to to October coup and the more apparent the Bolshevik
threat, the wider this realization spread among Jews, leading them to oppose
Bolshevism. It was taking root even among socialist parties and during the
October coup many Jewish socialists were actively against it. Yet they were
debilitated by their socialist views and their opposition was limited by
negotiations and newspaper articles until the Bolsheviks shut down those
newspapers.
It is necessary to state explicitly that the October coup was not carried by
Jews (though it was under the general command of Trotsky and with energetic
actions of young Grigory Chudnovsky during the arrest of Provisional
Government and the massacre of the defenders of the Winter Palace). Broadly
speaking, the common rebuke, that the 170-million-people could not be pushed
into Bolshevism by a small Jewish minority, is justified. Indeed, we had
ourselves sealed our fate in 1917, through our foolishness from February to
October-December.
The October coup proved a devastating lot for Russia. Yet the state of
affairs even before it promised little good to the people. We had already lost
responsible statesmanship and the events of 1917 had proved it in excess. The
best Russia could expect was an inept, feeble, and disorderly pseudo-
democracy, unable to rely on enough citizens with developed legal
consciousness and economic independence.
After October fights in Moscow, representatives of the Bund and Poale-
Zion had taken part in the peace negotiations not in alliance with the Junkers
or the Bolsheviks but as a third independent party. There were many Jews
among Junkers of the Engineers School who defended the Winter Palace on
October 25: in the memoirs of Sinegub, a palace defender, Jewish names appear
regularly; I personally knew one such engineer from my prison experience. And
during the Odessa City Duma elections the Jewish block had opposed the
Bolsheviks and won, though only marginally.
During the Constituent Assembly elections more than 80% of Jewish
population in Russia had voted for Zionist parties. 1775 Lenin wrote that 550
thousands voted for Jewish nationalists.1776 Most Jewish parties have formed a
united national list of candidates; seven deputies were elected from that list
six Zionists and Gruzenberg. The success of Zionists was facilitated by the

1774Rech, August 16, 1917, p. 3.

1775V. Boguslavsky. V sachshitu Kunyaeva [In Defense of Kunyaev] // 22, 1980, (16), p.
169.
1776Lenin, 4th edition, v. 30, p. 231.
recently published declaration of British Minister of Foreign Affairs Balfour on
the establishment of Jewish national home in Palestine, which was met with
enthusiasm by the majority of Russian Jewry (celebratory demonstrations,
rallies and worship services took place in Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, Kiev and
many other cities).1777
Prior to the October coup, Bolshevism was not very influential among
Jews. But just before the uprising, Natanson, Kamkov, and Shteinberg on behalf
of the left Socialist Revolutionaries had signed a combat pact with Bolsheviks
Trotsky and Kamenev.1778 And some Jews distinguished themselves among the
Bolsheviks in their very first victories and some even became famous. The
commissar of the famed Latvian regiments of the 12th Army, which did so
much for the success of Bolshevik coup, was Semyon Nakhimson. Jewish
soldiers played a notable role during preparation and execution of the armed
uprising of October 1917 in Petrograd and other cities, and also during
suppression of mutinies and armed resurrections against the new Soviet
regime.1779
It is widely known that during the historical session of the Congress of
Soviets on October 27 two acts, the Decree on Land and the Decree on
Peace, were passed. But it didnt leave a mark in history that after the Decree
on Peace but before the Decree on Land another resolution was passed. It
declared it a matter of honor for local soviets to prevent Jewish and any other
pogroms by dark forces.1780(Pogroms by Red forces of light were not
anticipated.)
So even here, at the Congress of Workers and Peasants Deputies, the
Jewish question was put ahead of the peasant one.

1777SJE, v.7, p. 381.

1778Kh. M. Astrakhan. Bolsheviki i ikh politicheskie protivniki v 1917 godu [The Bolsheviks
and Their Political Adversaries in 1917]. Leningrad, 1973, p. 407.
1779Aron Abramovich. V reshayuchshey voine: Uchastie i rol evreev SSSR v voine protiv
natsisma [In the Deciding War: Participation and Role of Jews in the USSR in the War
Against Nazism] 2nd Edition, Tel Aviv, 1982, v. 1, p. 45, 46.
1780L. Trotsky. Istoriya russkoi revolutsii. T. 2: Oktyabrskaya revolutsia [The History of
Russian Revolution]. Berlin, Granit, 1933, v. 2: October Revolution, Part 2, p. 361.
 Chapter 15. Alongside the Bolsheviks

This themethe Jews alongside the Bolsheviksis not new, far from it. How
many pages already written on the subject! The one who wants to demonstrate
that the revolution was anything but Russian, foreign by nature, invokes
Jewish surnames and pseudonyms, thus claiming to exonerate the Russians
from all responsibility in the revolution of seventeen. As for the Jewish authors,
those who denied the Jews share in the revolution as well as those who have
always recognised it, all agree that these Jews were not Jews by spirit, they were
renegades.
We also agree on that. We must judge people for their spirit. Yes, they were
renegades.
But the Russian leaders of the Bolshevik Party were also not Russians by
the spirit; they were very antiRussian, and certainly antiOrthodox. With them,
the great Russian culture, reduced to a doctrine and to political calculations, was
distorted.
The question should be asked in another way, namely: how many scattered
renegades should be brought together to form a homogeneous political current?
What proportion of nationals? As far as the Russian renegades are concerned,
the answer is known: alongside the Bolsheviks there were enormous numbers,
an unforgivable number. But for the Jewish renegades, what was, by the
enrolment and by the energy deployed, their share in the establishment of
Bolshevik power?
Another question concerns the attitude of the nation towards its own
renegades. However, the latter was contrasted, ranging from abomination to
admiration, from mistrust to adherence. It has manifested itself in the very
reactions of the popular masses, whether Russian, Jewish, or Lithuanian, in life
itself much more than in the briefings of historians.
And finally: can nations deny their renegades? Is there any sense in this
denial? Should a nation remember or not remember them? Can it forget the
monster they have begotten? To this question the answer is no doubt: it is
necessary to remember. Every people must remember its own renegades,
remember them as their ownto that, there is no escape.
And then, deep down, is there an example of renegade more striking than
Lenin himself? However, Lenin was Russian, there is no point in denying it.
Yes, he loathed, he detested everything that had to do with ancient Russia, all
Russian history and a fortiori Orthodoxy. From Russian literature he had
retained only Chernyshevsky and SaltykovShchedrin; Turgenev, with his liberal
spirit, amused him, and Tolstoy the accuser, too. He never showed the least
feeling of affection for anything, not even for the river, the Volga, on whose
banks his childhood took place (and did he not instigate a lawsuit against his
peasants for damage to his lands?). Moreover: it was he who pitilessly delivered
the whole region to the appalling famine of 1921. Yes, all this is true. But it was
we, the Russians, who created the climate in which Lenin grew up and filled
him with hatred. It is in us that the Orthodox faith has lost its vigour, this faith
in which he could have grown instead of declaring it a merciless war. How can
one not see in him a renegade? And yet, he is Russian, and we Russians, we
answer for him. His ethnic origins are sometimes invoked. Lenin was a mestizo
issued from different races: his paternal grandfather, Nikolai Vasilyevich, was of
Kalmyk and Chuvash blood, his grandmother, Anna Aleksievna Smirnova, was
a Kalmyk, his other grandfather, Israel (Alexander of his name of baptism)
Davidovitch Blank, was a Jew, his other grandmother, Anna Iohannovna
(Ivanovna) Groschopf, was the daughter of a German and a Swede, Anna Beata
Estedt. But that does not change the case. For nothing of this makes it possible
to exclude him from the Russian people: we must recognise in him a Russian
phenomenon on the one hand, for all the ethnic groups which gave him birth
have been implicated in the history of the Russian Empire, and, on the other
hand, a Russian phenomenon, the fruit of the country we have built, we
Russians, and its social climateeven if he appears to us, because of his spirit
always indifferent to Russia, or even completely antiRussian, as a phenomenon
completely foreign to us. We cannot, in spite of everything, disown him.
What about the Jewish renegades? As we have seen, during the year 1917,
there was no particular attraction for the Bolsheviks that manifested among the
Jews. But their activism has played its part in the revolutionary upheavals. At
the last Congress of the Russian SocialDemocratic Labour Party (RSDLP)
(London, 1907), which was, it is true, common with the Mensheviks, of 302
305 delegates, 160 were Jews, more than halfit was promising. Then, after
the April 1917 Conference, just after the announcement of the explosive April
Theses of Lenin, among the nine members of the new Central Committee were
G. Zinoviev, L. Kamenev, Ia. Sverdlov. At the VIth summer Congress of the
RKP (b) (the Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks, the new name of the
RSDLP), eleven members were elected to the Central Committee, including
Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Uritsky.1781 Then, at the historic meeting in
Karpovka Street, in the apartment of Himmer and Flaksermann, on 10 October
1917, when the decision to launch the Bolshevik coup was taken, among the
twelve participants were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Uritsky,
Sokolnikov. It was there that was elected the first Politburo which was to
have such a brilliant future, and among its seven members, always the same:
Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov. Which is already a lot. D. S.
Pasmanik clearly states: There is no doubt that the Jewish renegades
1781SJE, t. 7, p. 399.
outnumbered the normal percentage; they occupied too great a place among
the Bolshevik commissioners.1782
Of course, all this was happening in the governing spheres of Bolshevism
and in no way foreshadowed a mass movement of Jews. Moreover, the Jewish
members of the Politburo did not act as a constituted group. Thus Kamenev and
Zinoviev were against a hasty coup. The only master of the work, the genius of
Octobers coup de force, was in fact Trotsky: he did not exaggerate his role in
his Lessons of October. This cowardly Lenin, who, he, had been hiding out,
made no substantial contribution to the putsch.
Basically, because of his internationalism and following his dispute with
the Bund in 1903, Lenin adhered to the opinion that there was not and never
would be such a thing as a Jewish nationality; that this was a reactionary
action which disunited the revolutionary forces. (In agreement with him, Stalin
held the Jews for a paper nation, and considered their assimilation inevitable.)
Lenin therefore saw antiSemitism as a manuvre of capitalism, an easy
weapon in the hands of counterrevolution, something that was not natural. He
understood very well, however, what mobilising force the Jewish question
represented in the ideological struggle in general. And to exploit, for the good of
the revolution, the feeling of bitterness particularly prevalent among the Jews,
Lenin was always ready to do so.
From the first days of the revolution, however, this appeal proved to be oh
so necessary! Lenin clung to it. He, who had not foreseen everything on the
plane of the state, had not yet perceived how much the cultivated layer of the
Jewish nation, and even more so its semicultivated layer, which, as a result of
the war, was found scattered throughout the whole of Russia, was going to save
the day throughout decisive months and years. To begin with, it was going to
take the place of the Russian officials massively determined to boycott the
Bolshevik power. This population was composed of border residents who had
been driven out of their villages and who had not returned there after the end of
the war. (For example, Jews expelled from Lithuania during the war had not all
returned after the revolution: only the small rural people had returned, while the
urban contingent of the Jews of Lithuania and the young had stayed to live in
the big cities of Russia.1783)
And it was precisely after the abolition of the Pale of Settlement in 1917
that the great exodus of Jews from its boundaries into the interior of the country
ensued.1784 This exodus is no longer that of refugees or expellees, but indeed of
new settlers. Information from a Soviet source for the year 1920 testifies: In
the city of Samara, in recent years, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees and
expellees have established themselves; in Irkutsk, the Jewish population has
1782D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo (Bolchevism i ioudaism) [The Russian
Revolution and the Jews {Bolshevism and Judaism}], Paris, 1923, p. 155.
1783S. Gringaouz, Evreiskaya natsionalnaia avtonomiia v Litve i drougikh stranakh Pribaltiki
[Jewish national selfgovernment in Lithuania and the other Baltic countries]BJWR-2, p.
46.
1784SJE, t. 2, p. 312.
increased, reaching fifteen thousand people; important Jewish settlements were
formed in Central Russia as well as on the banks of the Volga and the Urals.
However, the majority continue to live on subsidies from social welfare and
other philanthropic organisations. And here are the Izvestia calling for the
Party organisations, the Jewish sections and the departments of the National
Commissariat to organise a vast campaign for the nonreturn to the tombs of
the ancestors and for the participation in the work of production in Soviet
Russia.1785
But put yourself in the place of the Bolsheviks: they were only a small
handful that had seized power, a power that was so fragile: in whom, great gods,
could one have confidence? Who could be called to the rescue? Simon
(Shimon) Dimantstein, a Bolshevik from the very beginning and who, since
January 1918, was at the head of a European Committee specially created
within the Commissariat of Nationalities, gives us the thought of Lenin on this
subject: the fact that a large part of the middle Jewish intelligentsia settled in
Russian cities has rendered a proud service to the revolution. They defeated the
vast sabotage enterprise we faced after the October Revolution, which was a
great danger to us. They were numerousnot all, of course, far from itto
sabotage this sabotage, and it was they who, at that fateful hour, saved the
revolution. Lenin considered it inappropriate to emphasise this episode in the
press, but he remarked that if we succeeded in seizing and restructuring the
State apparatus, it was exclusively thanks to this pool of new civil servants
lucid, educated, and reasonably competent.1786
The Bolsheviks thus appealed to the Jews from the very first hours of their
takeover, offering to some executive positions, to others tasks of execution
within the Soviet State apparatus. And many, many, answered the call, and
immediately entered. The new power was in desperate need of executors who
were faithful in every wayand there were many of them among the young
secularised Jews, who thus mingled with their colleagues, Slavs and others.
These were not necessarily renegades: there were among them some without
political party affiliations, persons outside the revolution, who had hitherto
remained indifferent to politics. For some, this approach was not ideological; it
could be dictated only by personal interest. It was a mass phenomenon. And
from that time the Jews no longer sought to settle in the forbidden countryside,
they endeavoured to reach the capitals: Thousands of Jews joined the
Bolsheviks in crowds, seeing them as the most fierce defenders of the
revolution and the most reliable internationalists The Jews abounded in the
lower levels of the Party apparatus.1787
The Jew, who obviously could not have come from the nobility, the clergy,
or the civil service, found himself among the ranks of the personalities of the
1785Izvestia, 12 Oct. 1920, p. 1.
1786V. Lenin, O evreiskom voprosis v Rossii [On the Jewish Question in Russia]. Preface by S.
Dimanstein, M., Proletarii, 1924, pp. 1718.
1787Leonard Schapiro, The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, in The
Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 40, London, Athlone Press, 196162, p. 164.
future of the new clan.1788 In order to promote the Jews commitment to
Bolshevism, at the end of 1917, while the Bolsheviks were still sketching out
their institutions, a Jewish department within the Commissariat of Nationalities
began to function.1789 This department was, since 1918, transformed into a
separate European Commissariat. And in March 1919, at the VIIIth Congress of
the RKP (b), the Communist European Union of Soviet Russia was to be
proclaimed as an integral but autonomous part of the RKP (b). (The intention
was to integrate this Union into the Comintern and thereby permanently
undermine the Bund). A special European section within the Russian Telegraph
Agency was also created (ROSTA).
D. Schub justifies these initiatives by saying that large contingents of the
Jewish youth joined the Communist Party following the pogroms in the
territories occupied by the Whites1790 (i.e. from 1919 onwards). But this
explanation does not hold the road. For the massive entry of the Jews into the
Soviet apparatus occurred towards the end of the year 1917 and during 1918.
There is no doubt that the events of 1919 (see infra, chapter 16) strengthened
the link between the Jewish elites and the Bolsheviks, but they in no way
provoked it. Another author, a communist, explains the particularly important
role of the Jewish revolutionary in our labour movement by the fact that we
can observe with the Jewish workers, highly developed, the traits of character
required of any leading role, traits which are still in draft form among the
Russian workers: an exceptional energy, a sense of solidarity, a systematic
mind.1791
Few authors deny the role of organisers that was that of the Jews in
Bolshevism. D. S. Pasmanik points out: The appearance of Bolshevism is
linked to the peculiarities of Russian history But its excellent organisation,
Bolshevism, is due in part to the action of the Jewish commissioners. 1792 The
active role of the Jews in Bolshevism did not escape the notice of observers,
notably in America: The Russian revolution rapidly moved from the
destructive phase to the constructive phase, and this is clearly attributable to the
edifying genius inherent to Jewish dissatisfaction.1793 In the midst of the
euphoria of October, how many were not, the Jews themselves admit it, with
their heads held high, their action within Bolshevism!
Let us remember: just as, before the revolution, the revolutionaries and
liberal radicals had been quick to exploit for political purposesand not for
charitythe restrictions imposed on Jews, likewise, in the months and years

1788M. Kheifets, Nashi obschiie ouroki [Our lessons]22, no. 14, p. 62.
1789Jewish Tribune, Weekly, Number dedicated to the interests of Russian Jews, Paris, 1923,
September 7, p. 1.
1790D. Schub, Evrei vrussko revolioutsii [The Jews in the Russian Revolution]BJWR-2, p.
142.
1791Iou. Larine, Evrei i antisemitizn v SSSR [The Jews and antiSemitism in the USSR], M.,
L., Giz, 1929, pp. 260262.
1792D. S. Pasmanik, Tchevo my dobyvaemsia? [What are we looking for?]RaJ, p. 212.
1793American Hebrew, Sept. 10, 1920, p. 507.
that followed October, the Bolsheviks, with the utmost complaisance, used the
Jews within the State apparatus and the Party, too, not because of sympathy, but
because they found their interest in the competence, intelligence and the
particularism of the Jews towards the Russian population. On the spot they used
Latvians, Hungarians, Chinese: these were not going to be sentimental
The Jewish population in its mass showed a suspicious, even hostile
attitude towards the Bolsheviks. But when, as a result of the revolution, it had
acquired complete freedom which fostered a real expansion of Jewish activity in
the political, social and cultural spheresa wellorganised activity to bootit
did nothing to prevent the Bolshevik Jews from occupying the key positions,
and these made an exceedingly cruel use of this new power fallen into their
hands.
From the 40s of the twentieth century onwards, after Communist rule broke
with international Judaism, Jews and communists became embarrassed and
afraid, and they preferred to stay quiet and conceal the strong participation of
Jews in the communist revolution, however the inclinations to remember and
name the phenomenon were described by the Jews themselves as purely anti
Semitic intentions.
In the 1970s and 1980s, under the pressure of new revelations, the vision of
the revolutionary years was adjusted. A considerable number of voices were
heard publicly. Thus the poet Nahum Korzhavin wrote: If we make the
participation of the Jews in the revolution a taboo subject, we can no longer talk
about the revolution at all. There was a time when the pride of this participation
was even prized The Jews took part in the revolution, and in abnormally high
proportions.1794 M. Agursky wrote on his part: The participation of the Jews in
the revolution and the civil war has not been limited to a very active
engagement in the State apparatus; it has been infinitely wider.1795 Similarly,
the Israeli Socialist S. Tsyroulnikov asserts: At the beginning of the revolution,
the Jews served as the foundation of the new regime.1796
But there are also many Jewish writers who, up to this day, either deny the
Jews contribution to Bolshevism, or even reject the idea rashly, orthis is the
most frequentconsider it only reluctantly.
However the fact is proven: Jewish renegades have long been leaders in
the Bolshevik Party, heading the Red Army (Trotsky), the VTsIK (Sverdlov), the
two capitals (Zinoviev and Kamenev), the Comintern (Zinoviev), the Profintern
(DridzoLozovski) and the Komsomol (Oscar Ryvkin, and later Lazar Shatskin,
who also headed the International Communist Youth).
It is true that in the first Sovnarkom there was only one Jew, but that one
was Trotsky, the number two, behind Lenin, whose authority surpassed that of
all the others.1797 And from November 1917 to the summer of 1918, the real
1794Literatournyi kourier [The Literary Courier], quarterly, USA, 1985, no. 11, p. 67.
1795M. Agursky, Ideologuia natsionalbolchevisma [The ideology of NationalBolshevism],
Paris, YMCA Press, 1980, p. 264.
1796S. Tsyroulnikov, SSSR, evrei i Israil [The USSR, the Jews, and Israel]TN, no. 96, p. 155.
1797L. Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 164165.
organ of government was not the Sovnarkom, but what was called the Little
Sovnarkom: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kareline, Prochian. After October, the
VTsIK Presidium was of equal importance to that of the Sovnarkom, and among
its six members were Sverdlov, Kamenev, Volodarski, SvetlovNakhamkis.
M. Agursky rightly points out: for a country where it was not customary to
see Jews in power, what a contrast! A Jew in the presidency of the country a
Jew in the Ministry of War There was there something to which the ethnic
population of Russia could hardly accustom itself to.1798 Yes, what a contrast!
Especially when one knows of what president, of what minister it was!

The first major action of the Bolsheviks was, by signing the peace separated
from BrestLitovsk, to cede to Germany an enormous portion of the Russian
territory, in order to assert their power over the remaining part. The head of the
signatory delegation was Ioffe; the head of foreign policy, Trotsky. His secretary
and attorney, I. Zalkin, had occupied the cabinet of comrade Neratov at the
ministry and purged the old apparatus to create a new organisation, the
Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
During the auditions held in 1919 in the American Senate and quoted
above, the doctor A. Simons, who from 1907 to 1918 had been the dean of the
Methodist Episcopal Church of Petrograd, made an interesting remark: While
they did not mince their words to criticise the Allies, Lenin, Trotsky, and their
followers never expressedat least I have never heardthe slightest blame on
Germany. And at the same time, when I spoke with official representatives of
the Soviet government, I discovered that they had a desire to preserve friendly
relations with America as far as possible. This desire was interpreted by the
allied chancelleries as an attempt to detach America from its partners.
Moreover, if the Soviet regime collapsed, they expected our country [the United
States] to serve as a refuge for the Bolshevik demons who could thus save their
skin.1799
The calculation is plausible. Is it not even certain? It may be supposed
that Trotsky himself, strengthened by his recent experience in America,
comforted his companions with this hope.
But where the calculation of the Bolshevik leaders was more ambitious and
wellfounded, it was when it dealt with the use of the great American financiers.
Trotsky himself was an incontestable internationalist, and one can believe
him when he declares emphatically that he rejects for himself all belonging to
Jewishness. But judging by the choices he made in his appointments, we see
that the renegade Jews were closer to him than the renegade Russians. (His two

1798M. Agursky, p. 264.

1799Oktiabrskaa revolioutsiia pered soudom amcrikanskikh senatorov [The October
Revolution in front of the tribunal of American Senators], Official Report of the Overmens
Committee of the Senate, M. L., GIZ, 1927, p. 7.
closest assistants were Glazman and Sermuks, the head of his personal guard,
Dreitser.1800) Thus, when it became necessary to find an authoritative and
ruthless substitute to occupy this post at the War Commissariatjudge the lack!
, Trotsky named without flinching Ephraim Sklyansky, a doctor who had
nothing of a soldier or a commissar. And this Sklyansky, as vicepresident of the
Revolutionary Council of War, would add his signature above the one of the
Supreme Commander, the General S. S. Kamenev!
Trotsky did not think for a moment of the impression that the appointment
of a doctor or the extraordinary promotion of a Sklyansky would make on the
noncommissioned members: he could not care less. And yet, it was he who
once declared: Russia has not reached the maturity necessary to tolerate a Jew
at its head; this famous sentence shows that the question concerned him all the
same when it was formulated about him
There was also this wellknown scene: the inaugural session of the
Constituent Assembly is opened on 5 January 1918 by the Dean of Deputies, S.
P. Chevtsov, but Sverdlov, with utter imprudence, snatches the bell from him,
chases him from the tribune, and resumes the meeting. This Constituent
Assembly, so long awaited, so ardently desired, that sacred sun that was about
to pour happiness onto Russiait only takes a few hours for Sverdlov and the
sailor Jelezniakov to wring its neck!
The panRussian Commission for the election of the Constituent Assembly
had previously been dissolved, and its organisation had been entrusted to a
private person, the young Brodsky. As for the Assemblyso ardently desired
its management was handed to Uritsky, who was assisted by Drabkin, who was
to set up a new chancellery. It was thus, by this kind of operation, that the new
type ofJewishgovernment was sketched. Other preliminary actions:
eminent members of the Constituent Assembly, personalities known to the
whole of Russia, such as the Countess Panina, an immense benefactress, were
arrested by an obscure personage, a certain Gordon. (According to the
newspaper Den [The Day], Gordon was the author of some wicked patriotic
articles that appeared in Petrogradski Kourier [The Courier of Petrograd], then
went on to trade in cabbage and chemical fertilisersbefore finally becoming
Bolshevik.1801)
Another thing not to be forgotten: the new masters of the country did not
neglect their personal interest. In other words: they plundered honest people.
Stolen money is usually converted into diamonds In Moscow, Sklyansky is
said to be the first diamond buyer; he was caught in Lithuania, during the
baggage verification of Zinovievs wife, Zlata BernsteinLilinajewelery was
found, worth several tens of millions of rubles.1802 (And to say that we believed
in the legend that the first revolutionary leaders were disinterested idealists!) In
1800Roheri Conquest, Bolshoi terror [The Great Terror], trans. from English The Great
Terror, London, 1968, French trans., Paris, 1968.
1801Den, 1917, December 5, p. 2.
1802S. S. Maslov, Rossiia posle tchetyriokh let revolioutsii (Russia after four years of
revolution), Paris, Rousskaya petchat, 1922, book 2, p. 190
the Cheka, a trustworthy witness tells us, himself having passed in its clutches
in 1920, the chiefs of the prisons were usually Poles or Latvians, while the
section in charge of the fight against traffickers, the least dangerous and the
most lucrative, was in the hands of Jews.1803
Other than the positions at the front of the stage, there existed in the
structure of Lenins power, as in any other conspiracy, silent and invisible
figures destined to never write their names in any chronicle: from Ganetski, that
adventurer Lenin liked, up to all the disturbing figures gravitating in the orbit of
Parvus. (This Evgeniya Sumenson, for example, who surfaced for a short time
during the summer of 1917, who was even arrested for financial manipulation
with Germany and who remained in liaison with the Bolshevik leaders,
although she never appeared on the lists of leaders of the apparatus) After the
days of July, Russkaya Volio published raw documents on the clandestine
activity of Parvus and his closest collaborator, Zurabov, who occupies today, in
the social democratic circles of Petrograd, a wellplaced position; were also
found in Petrograd Misters Binstock, Levin, Perazich and a few others.1804
Or also: Samuel Zaks, the brotherinlaw of Zinoviev (his sisters husband),
the boss of the subsidiary of the Parvus pharmacy in Petrograd and the son of a
wealthy maker of the city, who had given the Bolsheviks, in 1917, a whole
printing house. Or, belonging to the Parvus team itself, Samuel Pikker
(Alexander Martynov1805, whom had formerly polemicised Lenin on theoretical
questionsbut now the time had come to serve the Party and Martynov had
gone into hiding).
Let us mention some other striking figures. The most illustrious (for
massacres in Crimea) Rosalia ZalkindZemlyachka, a real fury of terror: she
was in 19171920, long before Kaganovich, secretary of the Committee of the
Bolsheviks of Moscow along with V. Zagorsky, I. Zelensky, I. Piatnitsky. 1806
When one knows that the Jews constituted more than a third of the population
of Odessa, it is not surprising to learn that in the revolutionary institutions of
Odessa there were a great number of Jews. The President of the Revolutionary
War Council, and later of the Sovnarkom of Odessa, was V. Yudovsky; the
chairman of the Provincial Party Committee, the Gamarnik. 1807 The latter would
soon rise in Kiev to be the chairman of the provincial committees
Revolutionary Committee, Party Executive Committee, then Chairman of the
Regional Committees, and finally Secretary of the Central Committee of

1803S. E. Troubetskoi, Minovchee [The Past], Paris, YMCA Press, 1989, pp. 195196, coll.
The Library of Russian Memoirs (LRM); Series: Our recent past, fasc. 10.
1804Ruskaya Uolia [The Russian Will], 1917, 8 July, evening delivery, p. 4.
1805Bolsheviki: Dokoumenty po istorii bolchevizma s 1903 in 1916 god byvch. Moskovskogo
Okhrannogo Otdeleniia [The Bolsheviks: Materials for the history of Bolshevism from 1903
to 1916 from the former Moscow Okhrana]. Presented by M. A. Tsiavlovski, supplemented
by A. M. Serebriannikov, New York, Telex, 1990, p. 318.
1806SJE, t. 5, p. 476.
1807SJE, t. 6, p. 124.
Belarus, member of the Military Region Revolutionary War Council of
Belarus.1808 And what about the rising star, Lazar Kaganovich, the president of
the Provincial Committee Party of Nizhny Novgorod in 1918? In August
September, the reports of mass terror operations in the province all begin with
the words: In the presence of Kaganovich, Kaganovitch being present 1809
and with what vigilance! There is a photo, which was inadvertently published
and which bears this caption: Photograph of the Presidium of one of the
meetings of the Leningrad Committee, that is to say of the Petrograd Soviet
after the October Revolution. The absolute majority at the presidium table is
constituted of Jews.1810
Reviewing all the names of those who have held important positions, and
often even key positions, is beyond the reach of anyone. We will cite for
illustrative purposes a few names, trying to attach them with a few details.
Here is Arkady Rosengoltz among the actors of the October coup in Moscow;
he was afterwards a member of the Revolutionary War Councils of several army
corps, then of the Republic; he was Trotskys closest assistant; he then
occupied a number of important posts: the Commissariat of Finance, the
Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (an organ of inquisition), and finally the
Commissariat for Foreign Trade for seven years.Semyon Nakhimson, who,
on the eve of October, was commissioner of the notorious Latvian skirmishers,
was the fierce commissioner of the military region of Yaroslav (he was killed
during an insurrection in the city).Samuel Zwilling, who, after his victory
over the Orenburg ataman, Dutov, took the head of the Orenburg District
Executive Committee (he was killed shortly thereafter).Zorakh Grindberg,
Commissioner for Instruction and Fine Arts of the Northern Commune, who
took a stand against the teaching of Hebrew, the right arm of Lunacharsky.
Here is Yevgeniya Kogan, wife of Kuybyshev: she was already in 1917
secretary of the Party Committee of the region of Samara; in 1918 19 she
became a member of the Volga Military Revolutionary Tribunal; in 1920 she
met at the Tashkent City Committee, then in 1921 in Moscow, where she
became Secretary of the City Committee and then Secretary of the National
Committee in the 1930s.And here is the secretary of Kuybyshev, Semyon
Zhukovsky: he goes from political sections to political sections of the armies;
he is sometimes found in the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee
of Turkestan, sometimes the political leader of the Baltic Fleet (for the
Bolsheviks, everything is at hand), and, finally, at the Central Committee.
Or there are the Bielienki brothers: Abram, at the head of the personal guard of
Lenin during the last five years of his life; Grigori, who moved from the
Krasnaya Presnia District Committee to the position of head of the agitprop at
the Comintern; finally, he is found at the Higher Council of the National

1808RJE (2nd edition revised and completed), t. 1, p. 267.

1809Nijegorodski Partarkhiv [Archives of the Nizhny Novgorod Party], f. 1, op. 1, file 66,
leaflets 3, 12, etc.
1810Larine, p. 258.
Economy, the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate (RKI), at the Commissariat
of Finances.Dimanstein, after passing through the European Commission and
the European Section, is at the Central Committee of LithuaniaBelarus, at the
Commissariat of Instruction of Turkestan, then Head of the Political Propaganda
of Ukraine.Or Samuel Filler, an apothecary apprentice from the province of
Kherson, who hoisted himself up to the presidium of the Cheka of Moscow and
then of the RKI.Anatoly (Isaac) Koltun (deserted and emigrated immediately
after, then returned in 1917): he is found both as a senior officer in the Central
Control Commission of the VKP (b) and in charge of the Party of Kazakhstan,
then in Yaroslavl, in Ivanovo, then back to the Control Commission, and then to
the Moscow Courtand suddenly he is in Scientific Research! 1811 The role of
the Jews is particularly visible in the RSFSR organs responsible for what
constitutes the crucial problem of those years, the years of war communism:
supplies. Lets just look at the key positions.Moisei Frumkin: from 1918 to
1922, member of the college of the Commissariat of Supply of the RSFSR, and
from 1921in full famineDeputy Commissioner: he is also Chairman of the
Board of Trustees of the Food Fund (Glavprodukt) and has as his assistant I.
Rafailov.Iakov BrandenbourgskiGoldzinski, returning from Paris in 1917
and immediately becoming a member of the Petrograd Supply Committee and
from 1918 onwards a member of the Commissariat; during the civil war, with
extraordinary powers in the VTsIK for requisition operations in several
provinces.Isaak Zelensky: in 191820 in the supply section of the Moscow
Soviet, then member of the college of the RSFSR Supply Commissariat; Later
in the Secretariat of the Central Committee and Secretary for Central Asia.
Semyon Voskov (arrived from America in 1917, actor of the October coup in
Petrograd): in 1918, commissioner of supply for the immense region of the
North.Miron VladimirovCheinfinkel: since October 1917 as head of the
supply service for the city of Petrograd, then member of the college of the
Supply Commission of the RSFSR; in 1921: commissioner for the Supply for
Ukraine, then for Agriculture. Grigori Zusmanovich, commissioner in 1918 at
the Supply of the Army in Ukraine.Moisei Kalmanovitch: late 1917,
commissioner of the Supply of the Western Front; In 19191920, commissioner
of the supply of the Byelorussian SSR, then of the LithuaniaBelarus SSR, and
chairman of a special commission for the supply of the Western Front (at the
summit of his career: president of the Administration Council of the Central
Bank of the USSR).1812
Recently published documents inform us of the way in which the great
peasant revolt of 1921 in Western Siberia broke out, the insurrection of Ichim.
After the fierce requisitions of 1920, when the region had, on 1 January 1921,
fulfilled the required requisition plan by 102%, the Supply Commissioner of the
Tyumen Province, Indenbaum, instituted an additional week to finalise it, the

1811(rec) Bolchevki [The Bolsheviks], 19031916, p. 340; RJE, t. 1, pp. 100101, 376, 427,
465466; t. 2, pp. 51, 61, 321, 482; t. 3, p. 306.
1812RJE, t. 1, pp. 160, 250, 234, 483, 502, 533; t. 3, p. 260.
1st to 7th January, i.e. the week before Christmas 1813. The commissioner of
requisitions at Ichim received, as did the others, the official direction:
Requisitions must be carried out without taking into account the consequences,
confiscating, if necessary, all the grain in the villages (emphasised by meA.
S.) and leaving the producer only a ration of famine. In a telegram signed by
his hand, Indenbaum demanded the most merciless repression and systematic
confiscation of the wheat that might still be there. In order to form the brigades
of requisition, were recruited, not with the consent of Ingenbaum, thugs, and
subproletarians who had no scruples in bludgeoning the peasants. The Latvian
Matvei Lauris, a member of the Provincial Commissariat of Supply, used his
power for his personal enrichment and pleasure: having taken up his quarters in
a village, he had thirtyone women brought in for himself and his squad. At the
Xth Congress of the RKP (b), the delegation of Tyumen reported that the
peasants who refused to give their wheat were placed in pits, watered, and died
frozen.1814
The existence of some individuals was only learned a few years later thanks
to obituaries published in the Izvestia. Thus: comrade Isaac Samoylovich
Kizelstein died of tuberculosis; he had been an agent of the Cheka College,
then a member of the Revolutionary War Council of the 5th and 14th Armies,
always devoted to the Party and to the working class. 1815 And oh how many of
these obscure workers of all nationalities were found among the stranglers of
Russia!
Bolshevik Jews often had, in addition to their surname as underground
revolutionaries, pseudonyms, or modified surnames. Example: in an obituary of
1928, the death of a Bolshevik of the first hour, Lev Mikhailovich Mikhailov,
who was known to the Party as Politikus, in other words by a nickname; his real
name, Elinson, he carried it to the grave.1816 What prompted an Aron Rupelevich
to take the Ukrainian surname of Taratut? Was Aronovitch Tarchis ashamed of
his name or did he want to gain more weight by taking the name of Piatnitsky?
And what about the Gontcharovs, Vassilenko, and others? Were they
considered in their own families as traitors or simply as cowards?
Observations made on the spot have remained. I. F. Najivin records the
impressions he received at the very beginning of Soviet power: in the Kremlin,
in the administration of the Sovnarkom, reigns disorder and chaos. We see only
Latvians and even more Latvians, Jews and even more Jews. I have never been
an antiSemite, but there were so many it could not escape your attention, and
each one was younger than the last.1817

1813According to the Julian calendar still in force in the Orthodox Church. Christmas is
celebrated on January 7th.
1814Zemlia sibirskaia, dalnievostotchnaia [Siberian Land, Far East], Omsk, 1993, nos. 56
(MayJune), pp. 3537.
1815Izvestia, 1931, 7 April, p. 2.
1816Izvestia, 1928, 6 March, p. 5; RJE, t. 2, pp. 295296.
1817Iv. Najivine, Zapiski o revolioutsii [Notes on the Revolution]. Vienna, 1921, p. 93.
 Korolenko himself, as liberal and extremely tolerant as he was, he who was
deeply sympathetic to the Jews who had been victims of the pogroms, noted in
his Notebooks in the spring of 1919: Among the Bolsheviks there are a great
number of Jews, men and women. Their lack of tact, their assurance are striking
and irritating, Bolshevism has already exhausted itself in Ukraine, the
Commune encounters only hatred on its way. One sees constantly emerge
among the Bolsheviksand especially the ChekaJewish physiognomies, and
this exacerbates the traditional feelings, still very virulent, of Judophobia.1818
From the early years of Soviet rule, the Jews were not only superior in
number in the upper echelons of the Party, but also, more remarkably and more
sensitively for the population, to local administrations, provinces and
townships, to inferior spheres, where the anonymous mass of the Streitbrecher
had come to the rescue of the new and still fragile power which had
consolidated it, saved it. The author of the Book of the Jews of Russia writes:
One cannot fail to evoke the action of the many Jewish Bolsheviks who
worked in the localities as subordinate agents of the dictatorship and who
caused innumerable ills to the population of the countryand he adds:
including the Jewish population.1819
The omnipresence of the Jews alongside the Bolsheviks had, during these
terrible days and months, the most atrocious consequences. Among them is the
assassination of the Imperial family, of which, today, everybody speaks, and
where the Russians now exaggerate the share of the Jews, who find in this
heartwrenching thought an evil enjoyment. As it should, the most dynamic
Jews (and they are many) were at the height of events and often at the command
posts. Thus, for the assassination of the Tsars family: the guards (the assassins)
were Latvians, Russians, and Magyars, but two characters played a decisive
role: Philip Goloshchekin and Yakov Yurovsky (who had received baptism).
The final decision belonged to Lenin. If he dared to decide in favour of the
assassination (when his power was still fragile), it was because he had foreseen
both the total indifference of the Allies (the King of England, cousin of the tsar,
had he not already, in the spring of 1918, refused asylum to Nicholas II?) And
the fatal weakness of the conservative strata of the Russian people.
Goloshchekin, who had been exiled to Tobolsk in 1912 for four years, and
who in 1917 was in the Urals, was in perfect agreement with Sverdlov: their
telephone conversations between Yekaterinburg and Moscow revealed that 1918
they were on firstname basis. As early as 1912 (following the example of
Sverdlov), Goloshchekin was a member of the Central Committee of the
Bolshevik Party. After the coup of October, he became secretary of the

1818P. I. Negretov, V. G. Korolenko; Letopis jizni i tvortchestva [V. G. Korolenko: Chronicle of

Life and Work, 19171921] under publ. of A. V. Khrabrovitski, Moskva: Kniga, 1990, p.
97, 106.
1819G. Aronson, Evreiskaya obschestvennost v Rossii v 19171918 gg. [The Jewish Public
Opinion in Russia in 19171918], SJE-2, 1968, p. 16.
Provincial Committee of Perm and Yekaterinburg, and later of the Ural Region
Committee, in other words he had become the absolute master of the region.1820
The project of assassination of the imperial family was ripening in the
brains of Lenin and his acolyteswhile, on their side, the two patrons of the
Urals, Goloshchekin and Bieloborodov (president of the Ural Soviet), simmered
their own machinations. It is now known that at the beginning of July 1918
Goloshchekin went to Moscow in order to convince Lenin that letting the tsar
and his family flee was a bad solution, that they had to be openly executed,
and then announce the matter publicly. Convincing Lenin that the tsar and his
family should be suppressed was not necessary, he himself did not doubt it for a
moment. What he feared was the reaction of the Russian people and the West.
There were, however, already indications that the thing would pass without
making waves. (The decision would also depend, of course, on Trotsky,
Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharinbut they were for the time absent from
Moscow, and their mentality, with the possible exception, possibly, of that of
Kamenev, allowed to suppose none of them would have anything to say about
it. Trotsky, as we know, approved of this without feeling any emotion. In his
diary of 1935, he says that on his arrival in Moscow he had a conversation with
Sverdlov. I asked incidentally: By the way, where is the tsar?Its done, he
replied. Executed.and the family?the family as well, with him.all of
them? I asked with a touch of astonishment. All of them! replied Sverdlov
so what? He was waiting for a reaction from me. I did not answer anything.
And who decided it? I asked.All of us, hereI did not ask any more
questions, I forgot about it Basically, this decision was more than reasonable,
it was necessarynot merely in order to frighten, to scare the enemy, to make
him lose all hope, but in order to electrify our own ranks, to make us understand
that there was no turning back, that we had before us only an undivided victory
or certain death.1821
M. Heifets sought out who was able to attend this last council chaired by
Lenin; without a doubt: Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky; probably: Petrovsky and
Vladimirski (of the Cheka), Stutchka (of the Commissariat for Justice);
Perhaps: V. Schmidt. Such was the tribunal that condemned the tsar. As for
Goloshchekin, he had returned to Yekaterinburg on 12 July, awaiting the last
signal sent from Moscow. It was Sverdlov who transmitted Lenins last
instruction. And Yakov Yurovsky, a watchmaker, the son of a criminal who had
been deported to Siberiawhere was born the offspringhad been placed in
July 1918 at the head of the Ipatiev house. This Yurovsky was manuvring the
operation and reflecting on the concrete means of carrying it out (with the help
of Magyars and Russians, including Pavel Medvedev, Piotr Ermakov), as well
as the best way of making the bodies disappear. 1822 (Let us point out here the

1820(Rec.) Bolshevik, 19031916, p. 13, pp. 283284.

1821Lev Trogski, Dnevniki i pisma [Newspapers and Letters], Ermitage, 1986, p. 101.
1822Mikhail Heifets, Tsareoubiistvo v 1918 godou [The Assassination of the Tsar in 1918],
MoscowJerusalem, 1991, pp. 246247, 258, 268271.
assistance provided by P. L. Vokov, the regional supply commissioner, who
supplied barrels of gasoline and sulphuric acid to destroy the corpses.) How the
deadly salvos succeeded each other in the basement of the Ipatiev house, which
of these shots were mortal, who were the shooters, nobody later could specify,
not even the executants. Afterwards, Yurovsky boasted of being the best: It
was the bullet from my colt that killed Nicholas. But this honour also fell to
Ermakov and his comrade Mauser.1823
Goloshchekin did not seek glory, and it is this idiot of Bieloborodov who
beat him. In the 1920s, everyone knew it was him, the tsars number one killer.
In 1936, during a tour in RostovonDon, during a Party Conference, he still
boasted of it from the rostrumjust a year before being himself executed. In
1941 it was Goloshchekins turn to be executed. As for Yurovsky, after the
assassination of the tsar, he joined Moscow, worked there for a year alongside
Dzerzhinsky (thus shedding blood) and died of natural death.1824
In fact, the question of the ethnic origin of the actors has constantly cast a
shadow over the revolution as a whole and on each of its events. All the
participations and complicities, since the assassination of Stolypin, necessarily
collided with the feelings of the Russians. Yes, but what about the assassination
of the tsars brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich? Who were his
assassins? Andrei Markov, Gavril Myasnikov, Nikolai Zhukov, Ivan
Kolpaschikovclearly, all of them Russians.
Here, everyone mustoh how much!ask themselves the question: have I
enlightened my people with a little ray of good, or have I obscured it with all the
darkness of evil?
So that is that when it comes to the executioners of the revolution. And
what about the victims? Hostages and prisoners by entire batches shot,
drowned on crowded barges: the officersRussians; the noblesmostly
Russians; the priests Russians; members of the ZemstvosRussians; and the
peasants fleeing enlistment in the Red Army, taken up in the forestsall
Russians. And this Russian intelligentsia of high moral, antiantiSemiticfor
it also, it was bad deaths and bloody basements. If names and lists of all those
who had been shot and drowned in the first years of Soviet power could be
found today, from September 1918 onwards, if statistics were available, it
would be surprising to find that the revolution in no way manifested its
international character, but indeed its antiSlavic character (in accordance,
moreover, with the dreams of Marx and Engels).
And it is this that has imprinted this deep and cruel mark on the face of the
revolution, which defines it best: who has it exterminated, carrying away its
dead forever, without return, far from this sordid revolution and this unfortunate
country, the body of this poor, misguided people?

1823Ibidem, p. 355.
1824Ibidem, pp. 246, 378380.
During all those months, Lenin was very much occupied with the climate of
tension that had arisen around the Jewish question. As early as April 1918, the
Council of the Peoples Commissars of Moscow and the Moscow region
published in the Izvestia1825 (thus for a wider audience than the region of
Moscow alone) a circular addressed to the Soviets on the question of the anti
Semitic propaganda of the pogroms, which evoked events having occurred in
the region of Moscow that recalled antiJewish pogroms (no city was named);
it stressed the need to organise special sessions among the Soviets on the
Jewish question and the fight against antiSemitism, as well as meetings and
conferences, in short, a whole propaganda campaign. But who, by the way, was
the number one culprit, who had to have his bones broken? But the Orthodox
priests, of course! The first point prescribed: Pay the utmost attention to the
antiSemitic propaganda carried out by the clergy; take the most radical
measures to stop the counterrevolution and the propaganda of the priests (we
do not ask ourselves at this moment what measures these were but, in reality,
who knows them better than we do?). Then point number two recommended to
recognise the necessity to not create a separate Jewish fighting organisation (at
the time a Jewish guard was being considered). The point number four entrusted
the Office of Jewish Affairs and the War Commissariat with the task of taking
preventive measures to combat antiJewish pogroms.
At the height of the same year 1918, Lenin recorded on gramophone a
special discourse on antiSemitism and the Jews. He there denounced the
cursed tsarist autocracy which had always launched uneducated workers and
peasants against the Jews. The tsarist police, assisted by landowners and
capitalists, perpetrated antiJewish pogroms. Hostility towards the Jews is
perennial only where the capitalist cabal has definitely obscured the minds of
the workers and the peasants There are among the Jews workmen, men of
labour, they are the majority. They are our brothers, oppressed as we are by
capitalism, they are our comrades who struggle with us for socialism Shame
on the cursed tsarism! Shame on those who sow hostility towards the
Jews!Recordings of this speech were carried all the way to the front,
transported through towns and villages aboard special propaganda trains which
crisscrossed the country. Gramophones spread this discourse in clubs,
meetings, assemblies. Soldiers, workers and peasants listened to their leaders
harangue and began to understand what this was all about.1826 But this speech,
at the time, was not published ( by intentional omission?); it only was so in
1926 (in the book of Agursky senior).
On 27 July 1918 (just after the execution of the imperial family), the
Sovnarkom promulgated a special law on antiSemitism: The Soviet of the

1825Izvestia, 1918, 28 April, p. 4.

1826Iou. Larine, Evrei i antisemitism v SSSR* [The Jews and antiSemitism in the USSR], pp.
78 (with a reference to S. Agursky, Evreiskii rabotchii v kommounistitcheskom dvijenii
[The Jewish Worker in the Communist Movement], Minsk GIZ, 1926, p. 155.
Peoples Commissars declares that any antiSemitic movement is a danger to
the cause of the Revolution of the workers and peasants. In conclusion (from
Lenins own hand, Lunacharsky tells us): The Sovnarkom directed all Soviet
deputations to take radical measures to eradicate antiSemitism. The inciters of
pogroms, those who propagate them, will be declared outlaws. Signed: VI.
Ulyanov (Lenin).1827
If the meaning of the word outlaw may have escaped some at the time, in
the months of the Red Terror it would appear clearly, ten years later, in a
sentence of a communist militantLarinewho was himself, for a while, the
commissar of the people and even the promoter of war communism: to
outlaw the active antiSemites was to shoot them.1828
And then there is Lenins famous reply to Dimanstein in 1919. Dimanstein
wished to obtain from Lenin that be retained the distribution of Gorkys tract
containing such praises to the address of the Jews that it could create the
impression that the revolution was based only on the Jews and especially on the
individuals from the middle class. Lenin repliedas we have already said
that, immediately after October, it was the Jews who had saved the revolution
by defeating the resistance of the civil servants, and consequently Gorkys
opinion was perfectly correct.1829 The Jewish Encyclopdia does not doubt it
either: Lenin refused to sweep under the carpet the extremely proSemite
proclamation of M. Gorky, and it was disseminated in great circulation during
the civil war, in spite of the fact that it risked becoming an asset in the hands of
the antiSemites who were enemies of the revolution.1830
And it became so, of course, for the Whites who saw two images merge,
that of Judaism and that of Bolshevism.
The surprising (shortsighted!) indifference of the Bolshevik leaders to the
popular sentiment and the growing irritation of the population is blatant when
we see how much Jews were involved in repression directed against the
Orthodox clergy: it was in summer 1918 that was initiated the assault on the
Orthodox churches in central Russia and especially in the Moscow region
(which included several provinces), an assault which only ceased thanks to the
wave of rebellions in the parishes.
In January 1918, the workers who were building the fortress of Kronstadt
rebelled and protested: the executive committee of the Party, composed
exclusively of nonnatives, had designated for guard duty, instead of militia
Orthodox priests, while not a Jewish rabbi, not a Moslem mullah, not a
Catholic pastor, not a Protestant pastor, was put to use. 1831 (Let us note in

1827Izvestia, 1918, 27 July, p. 4.

1828Iou. Larine, p. 259.
1829V. I. Lenin, O evreiskom voprose v Rossii [On the Jewish Question in Russia], preface by
S. Dimanstein. M., Proletarii, 1924, 3 July.
1830SJE, t. 4, p. 766.
1831Tserkovnye Vedomosti [News of the Church], 1918, no. 1 (quoted according to M.
Agursky, p. 10)
passing that even on this small, fortified island of the prison of the peoples
there were places of worship for all the confessions)
A text entitled Charge on the Jews! appeared even all the way to the
Pravda, a call from the workers of Arkangelsk to Russian workers and
peasants conscious of their fate, in which they read: are profaned, defiled,
plunderedexclusively Orthodox churches, never synagogues Death by
hunger and disease carries hundreds of thousands of innocent lives among the
Russians, while the Jews do not die of hunger or disease. 1832 (There was also,
during the summer 1918, a criminal case of antiSemitism in the church of
Basil the Blissful, in Moscow).
What madness on the part of the Jewish militants to have mingled with the
ferocious repression exerted by the Bolsheviks against Orthodoxy, even more
fierce than against the other confessions, with this persecution of priests, with
this outburst in the press of sarcasms aimed at the Christ! The Russian pens also
zealously attacked Demian Bedny (Efim Pridvorov), for example, and he was
not the only one. Yes, the Jews should have stayed out of it.
On 9 August 1919, Patriarch Tikhon wrote to the president of the VTsIK
Kalinin (with a copy to the Sovnarkom president, UlyanovLenin) to demand
the dismissal of the investigating magistrate Chpitsberg, in charge of the
affairs of the Church: a man who publicly outrages the religious beliefs of
people, who openly mocks ritual gestures, who, in the preface to the book The
Religious Plague (1919), gave Jesus Christ abominable names and thus
profoundly upset my religious feeling.1833 The text was transmitted to the Small
Sovnarkom, from which came the reply on 3 September: classify the complaint
of citizen Belavine (Patriarch Tikhon) without followup.1834 But Kalinin
changed his mind and addressed a secret letter to the Justice Commissioner,
Krasikov, saying that he believed that for practical and political
considerations replace Chpitsberg with someone else, given that the
audience in the court is probably in its majority Orthodox and that it is
therefore necessary to deprive the religious circles of their main reason for
ethnic revenge.1835
And what about the profanation of relics? How could the masses
understand such an obvious outrage, so provocative? Could the Russians, the
Orthodox have done such things? they asked each other across Russia. All
that, it is the Jews who have plotted it. It makes no difference, to those who
crucified Christ.1836And who is responsible for this state of mind, if not the
Bolshevik power, by offering to the people spectacles of such savagery?

1832Pravda, 1919, 3 July.

1833Sledstvennoe delo Patriarkha Tikhona [The instruction of Patriarch Tikhon], rec. of
documents from the materials of the Central Archives, M., 2000, doc. no. 58, pp. 600604.
1834GARF, f. 130, op. 4, ed. Khr. 94, l. 1, Minutes of the meeting of the Small Council of 2
Sept. 1920, no. 546.
1835GARF, f. 1235, op. 56, d. 26, l. 43.
1836S. S. Maslov, p. 43.
 S. Bulgakov, who followed closely what happened to Orthodoxy under the
Bolsheviks, wrote in 1941: In the USSR, the persecution of Christians
surpassed in violence and amplitude all previous persecutions known
throughout History. Of course, we should not blame everything on the Jews, but
we should not downplay their influence.1837Were manifested in Bolshevism,
above all, the force of will and the energy of Judaism.The part played by
the Jews in Bolshevism is, alas, disproportionately great. And it is above all the
sin of Judaism against BenIsrael And it is not the sacred Israel, but the
strong will of Judaism that, in power, manifested itself in Bolshevism and the
crushing of the Russian people.Although it derived from the ideological
and practical programme of Bolshevism, without distinction of nationality, the
persecution of Christians found its most zealous actors among Jewish
commissioners of militant atheism, and to have put a Goubelman
Iaroslavski at the head of the Union of the Godless was to commit in the face
of all the Russian Orthodox people an act of religious effrontery.1838
Another very ostensible effrontery: this way of rechristening cities and
places. Custom, in fact, less Jewish than typically Soviet. But can we affirm that
for the inhabitants of Gatchina, the new name of their cityTrotskdid not
have a foreign resonance? Likewise for Pavlosk, now Slutsk Uritsky gives its
name to the square of the Palace, Vorovski to the SaintIsaac Plaza, Volodarski
to the Prospect of the Founders, Nakhimson to the Saint Vladimir Prospect,
Rochal to the barge of the Admiralty, and the secondclass painter Isaak
Brodsky gives his name to the so beautiful Saint Michael street
They could no longer stand each other, their heads were turning. Through
the immensity of Russia, it flashes by: Elisabethgrad becomes Zinovievsk
and lets go boldly! The city where the tsar was assassinated takes the name of
the assassin: Sverdlovsk.
It is obvious that was present in the Russian national consciousness, as
early as 1920, the idea of a national revenge on the part of Bolshevik Jews,
since it even appeared in the papers of the Soviet government (it served as an
argument to Kalinin).
Of course, Pasmaniks refutation was right: For the wicked and narrow
minded, everything could not be explained more simplythe Jewish Kahal1839
has decided to seize Russia; or: it is the revengeful Judaism that settles its
accounts with Russia for the humiliations undergone in the past.1840 Of course,
we cannot explain the victory and the maintenance of the Bolsheviks.But: if
the pogrom of 1905 burns in the memory of your family, and if, in 1915, were
driven out of the western territories, with the strikes of a whip, your brothers by
blood, you can very well, three or four years later, want to avenge yourself in
1837Arch. Sergui Bulgakov Khristianstvo i evreiskii vopros [Christianity and the Jewish
Question], rec, Paris, YMCA Press, 1991, p. 76.
1838Ibidem, pp. 98, 121, 124.
1839Former governing body of the Jewish Community.
1840D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and the
Jews], p. 156.
your turn with a whip or a revolver bullet. We are not going to ask whether
Communist Jews consciously wanted to take revenge on Russia by destroying,
by breaking the Russian heritage, but totally denying this spirit of vengeance
would be denying any relationship between the inequality in rights under the
tsar and the participation of Jews in Bolshevism, a relationship that is constantly
evoked.
And this is how I. M. Biekerman, confronted with the fact of the
disproportionate participation of the Jews in the work of barbaric destruction,
to those who recognise the right of the Jews to avenge past persecutions, refutes
this right: the destructive zeal of our coreligionists is blamed on the State,
who, by its vexations and persecutions, would have pushed the Jews into the
revolution; well no, he says, for it is to the manner in which an individual
reacts to the evil suffered that he is distinguished from another, and the same is
true of a community of men.1841
Later, in 1939, taking in the destiny of Judaism under the black cloud of the
coming new era, the same Biekerman wrote: The great difference between the
Jews and the world around them was that they could only be the anvil, and
never the hammer.1842
I do not intend to dig here, in this limited work, the great historical
destinies, but I am expressing a categorical reservation on this point: perhaps
this was so since the beginning of time, but, as of 1918, in Russia, and for
another fifteen years, the Jews who joined the revolution also served as hammer
at least a large part of them.
Here, in our review, comes the voice of Boris Pasternak. In his Doctor
Zhivago, he writes, it is true, after the Second World War, thus after the
Cataclysm which came down, crushing and sinister, over the Jews of Europe
and which overturned our entire vision of the worldbut, in the novel itself, is
discussed the years of the revolution, he speaks of this modest, sacrificial
way of remaining aloof, which only engenders misfortune, of their [i.e. the
Jews] fragility and their inability to strike back.
Yet, did we not both have before us the same countryat different ages,
certainly, but where we lived the same 20s and 30s? The contemporary of those
years remains mute with astonishment: Pasternak would thus not have seen (I
believe) what was happening?His parents, his painter father, his pianist
mother, belonged to a highly cultivated Jewish milieu, living in perfect harmony
with the Russian intelligentsia; he himself grew up in a tradition already quite
rich, a tradition that led the Rubinstein brothers, the moving Levitan, the subtle
Guerchenson, the philosophers Frank and Chestov, to give themselves to Russia
and Russian culture It is probable that this unambiguous choice, that perfect
equilibrium between life and service, which was theirs, appeared to Pasternak as

1841I. M. Biekerman, Rossiia i rousskoie evrcistvo [Russia and the Russian Jews], RaJ, p. 25.
1842Id, K samosoznaniou evreia tchem my byli. Tchem my doljny, byt [For the self
consciousness of the Jew: who have we been, who we must become], Paris, 1930, p. 42.
the norm, while the monstrous gaps, frightening relative to this norm, did not
reach the retina of his eye.
On the other hand, these differences penetrated the field of view of
thousands of others. Thus, witness of these years, Biekerman writes: The too
visible participation of the Jews in the Bolshevik saturnalia attracts the eyes of
the Russians and those of the whole world.1843
No, the Jews were not the great driving force of the October coup. The
latter, moreover, brought them nothing, since the February revolution had
already granted them full and complete freedom. But, after the coup de force
took place, it was then that the younger laic generation quickly changed horses
and launched themselves with no less assurance into the infernal gallop of
Bolshevism.
Obviously, it was not the melamedes1844 that produced this. But the
reasonable part of the Jewish people let itself be overwhelmed by hotheads. And
thus an almost entire generation became renegade. And the race was launched.
G. Landau looked for the motives that led the younger generation to join the
camp of the new victors. He writes: Here was the rancour with regard to the
old world, and the exclusion of political life and Russian life in general, as well
as a certain rationalism peculiar to the Jewish people, and willpower which,
in mediocre beings, can take the form of insolence and ruthless ambition.1845
Some people seek an apology by way of explanations: The material
conditions of life after the October coup created a climate such that the Jews
were forced to join the Bolsheviks.1846 This explanation is widespread: 42% of
the Jewish population of Russia were engaged in commercial activity; they lost
it; they found themselves in a deadend situationwhere to go? In order not to
die of hunger, they were forced to take service with the government, without
paying too much attention to the kind of work they were asked to do. It was
necessary to enter the Soviet apparatus where the number of Jewish officials,
from the beginning of the October Revolution, was very high.1847
They had no way out? Did the tens of thousands of Russian officials who
refused to serve Bolshevism have somewhere to go?To starve? But how were
living the others? Especially since they were receiving food aid from
organisations such as the Joint, the ORT 1848, financed by wealthy Jews from the
West. Enlisting in the Cheka was never the only way out. There was at least
another: not to do it, to resist.

1843I. M. Biekerman, RaJ, pp. 1415.

1844Those who teach Jewish law privately.
1845G. A. Landau, Revolioutsionnye idei v evreiskoi obschestvennosti [The Revolutionary
Ideas in Jewish Public Opinion], RaJ, p. 117.
1846D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and the
Jews], p. 156.
1847D. S. Pasmanik, p. 157.
1848Obchtchestvo Pemeslennogo Troude welded evreiev: Association for craftwork among
Jews.
 The result, Pasmanik concludes, is that Bolshevism became, for the
hungry Jews of cities, a trade equal to the previous tradestailor, broker, or
apothecary.1849
But if this is so, it may be said, seventy years later, in good conscience: for
those who did not want to immigrate to the United States and become
American, who did not want to immigrate to Palestine to remain Jews, for
those, the only issue was communism?1850 Againthe only way out!?
It is precisely this that is called renouncing ones historical responsibility!
Other arguments have more substance and weight: A people that has
suffered such persecutionand this, throughout its historycould not, in its
great majority, not become bearers of the revolutionary doctrine and
internationalism of socialism, for it gave its Jewish followers the hope of
never again being pariahs on this very earth, and not in the chimerical
Palestine of the great ancestors. Further on: During the civil war already, and
immediately afterwards, they were stronger in competition with the newcomers
from the ethnic population, and they filled many of the voids that the revolution
had created in society In doing so, they had for the most part broken with
their national and spiritual tradition, after which all those who wanted to
assimilate, especially the first generation and at the time of their massive
apparition, took root in the relatively superficial layers of a culture that was new
to them.1851
One wonders, however, how it is possible that the centuriesold traditions
of this ancient culture have proved powerless to counteract the infatuation with
the barbaric slogans of the Bolshevik revolutionaries.1852 When socialism, the
companion of the revolution, melted onto Russia, not only were these Jews,
numerous and dynamic, brought to life on the crest of the devastating wave, but
the rest of the Jewish people found itself deprived of any idea of resistance and
was invited to look at what was happening with a perplexed sympathy,
wondering, impotent, what was going to result from it.1853 How is it that in
every circle of Jewish society the revolution was welcomed with enthusiasm, an
inexplicable enthusiasm when one knows of what disillusionments composed
the history of this people? How could the Jewish people, rationalist and lucid,
allow itself to indulge in the intoxication of revolutionary phraseology1854?
D. S. Pasmanik evokes in 1924 those Jews who proclaimed loudly and
clearly the genetic link between Bolshevism and Judaism, who openly boasted
about the sentiments of sympathy which the mass of the Jewish people

1849D. Choub, Evrei v rousskoi revolioutsii [The Jews in the Russian Revolution], BJWR-2, p.
143.
1850Chlomo Avineri, Vozvraschenie v istoriiou [Back to the story]22, 1990, no. 73, p. 112.
1851D. Chiurmann, O natsionalnykh fobiiakh [On national phobias],22, 1989, no. 68, pp.
149150.
1852I. O. Levine, Evrei v revolioutsii [The Jews in the Revolution], RaJ, p. 127.
1853Landau, RaJ, p. 109.
1854D. O. Linski, O natsionalnom samosoznanii rousskogo evreia [The National Consciousness
of the Russian Jew], RaJ, pp. 145, 146.
nourished towards the power of the commissioners.1855 At the same time,
Pasmanik himself pointed out the points which may at first be the foundation
of a rapprochement between Bolshevism and Judaism These are: the concern
for happiness on earth and that of social justice Judaism was the first to put
forward these two great principles.1856
We read in an issue of the London newspaper Jewish Chronicle of 1919
(when the revolution had not yet cooled down) an interesting debate on the
issue. The permanent correspondent of this paper, a certain Mentor, writes that
it is not fitting for the Jews to pretend that they have no connection with the
Bolsheviks. Thus, in America, the Rabbi and Doctor Judah Magnes supported
the Bolsheviks, which means that he did not regard Bolshevism as incompatible
with Judaism.1857 He writes again the following week: Bolshevism is in itself a
great evil, but, paradoxically, it also represents the hope of humanity. Was the
French Revolution not bloody, it as well, and yet it was justified by History. The
Jew is idealistic by nature and it is not surprising, it is even logical that he
believed the promises of Bolshevism. There is much room for reflection in the
very fact of Bolshevism, in the adherence of many Jews to Bolshevism, in the
fact that the ideals of Bolshevism in many respects join those of Judaisma
great number of which have been taken up by the founder of Christianity. The
Jews who think must examine all this carefully. One must be foolish to see in
Bolshevism only its offputting aspects1858
All the same, is not Judaism above all the recognition of the one God? But,
this in itself is enough to make it incompatible with Bolshevism, the denier of
God!
Still on the search for the motives for such a broad participation of the Jews
in the Bolshevik adventure, I. Biekerman writes: We might, before of the facts,
despair of the future of our peopleif we did not know that, of all the
contagions, the worst is that of words. Why was the Jewish consciousness so
receptive to this infection, the question would be too long to develop here. The
causes reside not only in the circumstances of yesterday, but also in the ideas
inherited from ancient times, which predispose Jews to be contaminated by
ideology, even if it is null and subversive.1859
S. Bulgakov also writes: The face that Judaism shows in Russian
Bolshevism is by no means the true face of Israel It reflects, even within
Israel, a state of terrible spiritual crisis, which can lead to bestiality.1860
As for the argument that the Jews of Russia have thrown themselves into
the arms of the Bolsheviks because of the vexations they have suffered in the

1855D. S. Pasmanik, RaJ, p. 225.

1856D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and Judaism],
p. 129.
1857Jewish Chronicle, 28 March 1919, p. 10.
1858Ibidem, 4 April 1919, p. 7.
1859Biekerman, RaJ, p. 34.
1860Arch. Sergui Bulgakov, Khristianstvo i evreiskii vopros [Christianity and the Jewish
Question], pp. 124125.
past, it must be confronted with the two other communist shows of strength that
occurred at the same time as that of Lenin, in Bavaria and in Hungary. We read
in I. Levin: The number of Jews serving the Bolshevik regime is, in these two
countries, very high. In Bavaria, we find among the commissaries the Jews E.
Levine, M. Levin, Axelrod, the anarchist ideologist Landauer, Ernst Toller.
The proportion of Jews who took the lead of the Bolshevik movement in
Hungary is of 95%. However, the situation of the Jews in terms of civic rights
was excellent in Hungary, where there had not been any limitation for a long
time already; in the cultural and economic sphere, the Jews occupied such a
position that the antiSemites could even speak of a hold of the Jews. 1861 We
may add here the remark of an eminent Jewish publisher of America; he writes
that the Jews of Germany have prospered and gained a high position in
society.1862 Let us not forget in this connection that the ferment of rebellion that
was at the origin of the coups de forceof which we shall speak again in
chapter 16had been introduced by the Bolsheviks through the intermediary of
repatriated prisoners stuffed with propaganda.
What brought all these rebels togetherand, later, beyond the seas, was
a flurry of unbridled revolutionary internationalism, an impulse towards
revolution, a revolution that was global and permanent. The rapid success of
the Jews in the Bolshevik administration could not be ignored in Europe and the
United States. Even worse: they were admired there! At the time of the passage
from February to October, Jewish public opinion in America did not mute its
sympathies for the Russian revolution.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were conducting their financial operations diligently

abroad, mainly via Stockholm. Since Lenins return to Russia, secret supplies
had come to them, of German provenance, through the Nia Banken of Olof
Aschberg. This did not exclude the financial support of certain Russian bankers,
those who, fleeing the revolution, had sought refuge abroad but had transformed
there into volunteer support of the Bolsheviks. An American researcher,
Anthony Sutton, has found (with half a century of delay) archival documents; he
tells us that, if we are to believe a report sent in 1918 to the State Department by
the U.S. Ambassador in Stockholm, among these Bolshevik bankers is the
infamous Dmitri Rubinstein that the revolution of February had gotten out of
prison, who had reached Stockholm and made himself the financial agent of the
Bolsheviks; we also find Abram Jivotovski, a relative of Trostky and Lev
Kamenev. Among the syndicates were Denisov of the exBank of Siberia,
Kamenka of the Bank AzovDon, and Davidov of the Bank for Foreign Trade.

1861Levine, RaJ, pp. 125, 126.

1862Norman Podgorets, Evrei v sovremennom mire [The Jews in the Modern World] (Int.)
BM, no. 86, p. 113.
Other Bolshevik bankers: Grigori Lessine, Shtifter, Iakov Berline, and their
agent Isidore Kohn.1863
These had left Russia. Others, in the opposite direction, left America to
return. They were the revenants, all of them revolutionaries (some from long
ago, others of recent date) who dreamed of finally building and consolidating
the New World of Universal Happiness. We talked about it in Chapter 14. They
were flocking across the oceans from the port of New York to the East or from
the port of San Francisco in direction of the West, some former subjects of the
Russian Empire, others purely and simply American citizens, enthusiasts who
even did not know the Russian language.
In 1919, A. V. TyrkovaWilliams wrote in a book published then in
England: There are few Russians among the Bolshevik leaders, few men
imbued with Russian culture and concerned with the interests of the Russian
people In addition to foreign citizens, Bolshevism recruited immigrants who
had spent many years outside the borders. Some had never been to Russia
before. There were many Jews among them. They spoke Russian badly. The
nation of which they had become masters was foreign to them and, moreover,
they behaved like invaders in a conquered country. And if, in tsarist Russia,
Jews were excluded from all official posts, if schools and State service were
closed to them, on the other hand, in the Soviet Republic all committees and
commissariats were filled with Jews. Often, they exchanged their Jewish name
for a Russian name but this masquerade did not deceive anyone.1864
That same year, 1919, at the Senate Hearings of the Overmen Commission,
an Illinois university professor, P. B. Dennis, who arrived in Russia in 1917,
declared that in his opinionan opinion that matched that of other Americans,
Englishmen, Frenchmen, these people deployed in Russia an extreme
cruelty and ferocity in their repression against the bourgeoisie (the word is
used here without any pejorative nuance in its primary sense: the inhabitants of
the boroughs). Or: Among those who carried out murderous propaganda in
the trenches and in the rear, there were those who, one or two years before [i.e.
in 19171918], still lived New York.1865
In February 1920, Winston Churchill spoke in the pages of the Sunday
Herald. In an article entitled Zionism Against Bolshevism: Struggle for the
Soul of the Jewish People, he wrote: Today we see this company of
outstanding personalities, emerging from clandestinity, from the basements of
the great cities of Europe and America, who grabbed by the hair and seized by
the throat the Russian people, and established itself as the undisputed mistress
of the immense Russian Empire.1866

1863A. Sutton, Orol strit i bolshevitskaya revolioutsiia, [Wall Street and the Bolshevik
Revolution], trans. from the English, M., 1998, pp. 141142.
1864Ariadna TyrkovaWilliams, From Liberty to BrestLitovsk London, Macmillan and Co.,
1919, pp. 297299.
1865Overmen, pp. 2223, 2627.
1866Jerry Muller, Dialektika traguedii antisemitizm i kommounizm v Tsentralno i Vostotchno
Evrope, Evreiskaya Tribouna* (The Jewish Tribune), 1920, no. 10, p. 3.
 There are many known names among these people who have returned from
beyond the ocean. Here is M. M. Gruzenberg: he had previously lived in
England (where he had met Sun Yatsen), then lived for a long time in the
United States, in Chicago where he had organised a school for the
immigrants, and we find him in 1919 general consul of the RSFSR in Mexico
(a country on which the revolutionaries founded great hopes: Trotsky would
turn up there), then, in the same year, he sat in the central organs of the
Comintern. He took service in Scandinavia, Sweden; he was arrested in
Scotland. He resurfaced in China in 1923 under the name of Borodin 1867 with a
whole squad of spies: he was the principal political adviser to the Executive
Committee of the Kuomintang, a role which enabled him to promote the career
of Mao Tsetung and of Zhou Enlai. However, having suspected Borodin
Gruzenberg of engaging in subversive work, Chiang Kaishek expelled him
from China in 1927. Returning to the USSR, he passed unharmed the year
1937; during the war with Germany, we find him editorinchief of the Soviet
Information Office alongside DridzoLozovsky. He will be executed in 1951. 1868
(About the Bolshevik Jews executed in the 1930s, see infra, chapter 19.)
Among them also, Samuel Agursky, who became one of the leaders of
Belarus; arrested in 1938, he served a sentence of deportation. (He is the father
of the late M. Agursky, who prematurely disappeared, and who did not follow
the same path as his progenitor, far from it!1869 1870Let us also mention
Solomon Slepak, an influential member of the Comintern, he returned to Russia
by Vladivostok where he took part in assassinations; he then went to China to
try to attract Sun Yatsen in an alliance with communism; his son Vladimir
would have to tear himself, not without a clash, from the trap into which his
father had fallen in his quest for the radiant future of communism. 1871 Stories
like this, and some even more paradoxical, there are hundreds of them.
Demolishers of the bourgeois Jewish culture also turned up. Among
them, the collaborators of S. Dimanstein in the European Commissariat: the S.
R. Dobkovski, Agursky (already mentioned), and also Kantor, Shapiro,
Kaplan, former emigrant anarchists who had returned from London and New
York. The objective of the Commissariat was to create a Centre for the Jewish
Communist Movement. In August 1918, the new Communist newspaper in
Yiddish Emes (the Truth) announced: The proletarian revolution began in the
street of the Jews; a campaign was immediately launched against the Heders
and the TalmudTorah In June 1919, countersigned by S. Agursky and
Stalin, the dissolution of the Central Bureau of the Jewish Communities was

1867This is the character of Mans Fate by Andre Malraux.

1868RJE, t. 1, p. 154.
1869Collaborator of the collection From Under the Rubble, published by Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn in 1974.
1870Ibidem, p. 22.
1871Chaim Potok, The Gates of November, Chronicles of the Slepak Family, New York, Alfred
A. Knopf, 1996, pp. 37, 4445.
proclaimed,1872 which represented the conservative fraction of Judaism, the one
that had not sided with the Bolsheviks.

It is nonetheless true that the socialist Jews were not attracted primarily to the
Bolsheviks. Now however: where were the other parties, what had become of
them? What allowed the Bolshevik Party to occupy an exclusive position was
the disintegration of the old Jewish political parties. The Bund, the Zionist
Socialists and the Zionists of the Poalei had split up and their leaders had joined
the victors camp by denying the ideals of democratic socialismsuch as M.
Raies, M. FroumkinaEster, A. Weinstein, M. Litvanov.1873
Is it possible? Even the Bund, this extremely belligerent organisation to
which even Lenins positions were not suitable, which showed itself so
intransigent on the principle of the cultural and national autonomy of the Jews?
Well yes, even the Bund! After the establishment of Soviet power, the
leadership of the Bund in Russia split into two groups (1920): the right, which
in its majority, emigrated, and the left which liquidated the Bund (1921) and
adhered in large part to the Bolshevik Party. 1874 Among the former members of
the Bund, we can cite the irremovable David Zaslavski, the one who for decades
would put his pen at the service of Stalin (he would be responsible for
stigmatising Mandelstam and Pasternak). Also: the Leplevski brothers, Israel
and Grigori (one, from the outset, would become an agent of the Cheka and stay
there for the rest of his life, the other would occupy a high position in the
NKVD in 1920, then would be Deputy Commissar of the People, President of
the Small Sovnarkom of the RSFSR, then Deputy Attorney General of the
USSR (193439); he would be a victim of repression in 1939. Solomon Kotliar,
immediately promoted First Secretary of Orthbourg, of Vologda, of Tver, of the
regional Committee of Orel. Or also Abram Heifets: he returned to Russia after
February 1917, joined the Presidium of the Bunds Main Committee in Ukraine,
was a member of the Central Committee of the Bund; in October 1917, he was
already for the Bolsheviks and, in 1919, he figured in the leading group of the
Comintern.1875
To the leftists of the Bund joined the left of the Zionist Socialists and the
SERP1876; those entered the Communist Party as early as 1919. The left wing of
the PoaleiTsion did the same in 1921.1877 In 1926, according to an internal

1872G. Aronson, Evreiski vopros v epokhou Stalina [The Jewish Question in Stalins Era],
BJWR, pp. 133134.
1873Ibidem, pp. 135136.
1874SJE, t. 1, p. 560.
1875RJE, t. 1, p. 478; t. 2, pp. 78, 163; t.3, p. 286.
1876Sotsialevreiskaya raborchaya partia: Jewish Social Workers Party.
1877S. Dimanstein, Revolioutsionnie dvijenie sredi evreev [The revolutionary movement
among the Jews] in The Revolutionaries through several essays, ed. of M. N. Pokrovski, t.
3, b. I, ML, GJZ, p. 215.
census, there were up to 2,500 former members of the Bund in the Party. It goes
without saying that many, later on, fell under the blade: Under Stalin, the
majority of them were victims of ferocious persecutions.1878
Biekerman exclaims: The Bund, which had assumed the role of
representative of the Jewish working masses, joined the Bolsheviks in its most
important and active part.1879
In his memoirs, David Azbel tries to explain the reasons for this accession
by reflecting on the example of his uncle, Aron Isaakievich Weinstein, an
influential member of the Bund that we mentioned above: He had understood
before all others that his Party, as well as the other socialist parties, were
condemned He had understood also another thing: to survive and continue to
defend the interests of the Jews would be possible only by joining the
Bolsheviks.1880
For how many of them the reasons 1) survive, 2) continue to defend the
interests of the Jews, were decisive? Tentatively, both objectives were achieved.
It will note also that after October the other socialist parties, the S.R. and
the Mensheviks, who, as we know, had a large number of Jews in their ranks
and at their heads, did not stand up against Bolshevism either. Scarcely aware of
the fact that the Bolsheviks had dismissed this Constituent Assembly which they
had called for, they withdrew, hesitated, divided themselves in their turn,
sometimes proclaiming their neutrality in the civil war, other times their
intention to temporise. As for the S.R., they downright opened to the
Bolsheviks a portion of the Eastern front and tried to demoralise the rear of the
Whites.
But we also find Jews among the leaders of the resistance to the Bolsheviks
in 1918: out of the twentysix signatures of the Open Letter of Prisoners on the
Affair of the Workers Congress written at Taganka Prison, no less of a quarter
are Jewish.1881 The Bolsheviks were pitiless towards the Mensheviks of this
kind. In the summer of 1918, R. Abramovich, an important Menshevik leader,
avoided execution only by means of a letter addressed to Lenin from an
Austrian prison by Friedrich Adler, the one who had shot down the Austrian
Prime Minister in 1916 and who had been reprieved. Others, too, were stoic:
Grigori Binshtok, Semyon Weinstein; arrested several times, they were
eventually expelled from the country.1882
In February 1921, in Petrograd, the Mensheviks certainly supported the
deceived and hungry workers, they pushed them to protest and strikebut
without any real conviction. And they lacked audacity to take the lead of the

1878SJE, t. 1, p. 560.
1879I. M. Biekerman, RaJ, p. 44.
1880D. Azbel, Do, vo vremia i posle [Avant, pendant et aprs], VM, 1989, no. 104, p. 231.
1881Nezavisimoie rabotcheie dvijeniie v 1918 godou: Dokumenty i materialy [The independent
workers movement], established by M. Bernstam, Paris, YMCA Press, 1981, pp. 291293,
in Research on Contemporary Russian History.
1882RJE, t. 1, pp. 135136, 199200.
Kronstadt insurrection. However, this did not in any way protect them from
repression.
We also know a lot of Mensheviks who joined the Bolsheviks, who
exchanged one party label for another. They were: Boris Maguidov (he became
head of the political section in the 10th Army, then Donbass, secretary of the
provincial committees of Poltava, Samara, instructor on the Central
Committee): Abram Deborine, a true defector (he rapidly climbed the echelons
of a career of red professor, stuffing our heads with Dialectical Materialism
and Historical Materialism); Alexander Goikhbarg (member of the Soviet
Revolutionary Committee, public prosecutor at the trial of the ministers of
Kolchak, member of the college of the Commissariat for Justice, then president
of the Little Sovnarkom). Some of them held out for some time until their
arrest, such as I. LiakhovetskiMaski1883; the others, in great numbers, were
reduced very early to silence, from the trial of the imaginary Unified
Menshevik Bureau of 1931 (where we find GuimmerSukhanov who was the
designer of the tactics of the Executive Committee in March 1917.) A huge raid
was organised throughout the Union to apprehend them.
There were defectors in the S.R.: Lakov Lifchitz, for example, vice
president of the Chernigov Cheka in 1919, then Kharkov, then president of the
Kiev Cheka and, at the height of a rapid career, vicepresident of the Ukrainian
GPU. There was anarchist communists, the most famous being Lazar Kogan
(Special Section of the Armies, Assistant to the Chief of the Army of the
Vecheka in 1930senior official of the Gulag and, in 1931, chief of the White
Sea shipyard of the NKVD). There are extremely sinuous biographies: Ilya Kit
Viitenko, a lieutenant in the Austrian army, taken prisoner by the Russians, and
from the moment the Bolsheviks are in power, takes his ranks at the Cheka
Guepeou and then in the army and, in the 1930s, was one of the reformers of the
Red Army. And then in the hole for twenty years!1884
And what about the Zionists? Let us remember: in 1906 they had posited
and proclaimed that they could not stay away from the Russians fight against
the yoke of the Autocracy, and they had actively engaged in the said battle. This
did not prevent them, in May 1918 (when the yoke still weighed so heavily), to
declare that, in matters of Russian domestic policy, they would henceforth be
neutral, very obviously in the hope of avoiding the risk that the Bolsheviks
would accuse them of being counterrevolutionaries.1885 And at firstit
worked. Throughout the year 1918 and during the first six months of 1919, the
Bolsheviks left them alone: in the summer of 1918 they were able to hold the
AllRussian Congress of Jewish Communities in Moscow, and hundreds of
these Communities had their Palestinian Week; their newspapers appeared
freely and a youth club, the Heraluts1886, was created.But in the spring of
1883RJE, t. 1, pp. 331, 419; t. 2, pp. 221222, 230.
1884RJE, t. 2, pp. 36, 5152, 176.
1885I. B. Shekhtman, Sovetskaia Rossiia, Sionizm i Izrail [Soviet Russia, Zionism, and Israel],
BJWR-2, p. 31.
1886Ibidem, p. 315.
1919 local authorities undertook to ban the Zionist press here and there, and in
the autumn of 1919 a few prominent figures were accused of espionage for the
benefit of England. In the spring of 1920, the Zionists organised a PanRussian
Conference in Moscow. Result: all the participants (90 people) were interned in
the Butyrka prison; some were condemned, but the penalty was not applied,
following the intervention of a delegation of Jewish syndicates from America.
The Vecheka presidium declared that the Zionist organisation was counter
revolutionary, and its activity was now forbidden in Soviet Russia From this
moment began the era of clandestinity for the Zionists.1887
M. Heifets, who is a thoughtful man, reminds us very well of this: did the
October coup not coincide exactly with the Balfour declaration which laid the
foundations of an independent Jewish state? Well, what happened?: A part of
the new Jewish generation followed the path of Herzl and Jabotinsky, while the
other [let us precise: the biggest] yielded to temptation and swelled the ranks of
the LeninTrotskyStalin band. (Exactly what Churchill feared.) Herzls way
then appeared distant, unreal, while that of Trotsky and Bagritsky enabled the
Jews to gain immediate stature and immediately become a nation in Russia,
equal in right and even privileged.1888
Also defector, of course, and not least, Lev Mekhlis, of the PoaleiTsion.
His career is well known: in Stalins secretariat, in the editorial board of the
Pravda, at the head of the Red Armys political sector, in the State Defence
Commissariat and Commissioner of State Control. It was he who made our
landing in Crimea in 1942 fail. At the height of his career: in the Orgburo of the
Central Committee. His ashes are sealed in the wall of the Kremlin.1889
Of course, there was an important part of the Jews of Russia who did not
adhere to Bolshevism: neither the rabbis, the lecturers, nor the great doctors, nor
a whole mass of good people, fell into the arms of the Bolsheviks. Tyrkova
writes in the same passage in her book, a few lines later: This predominance of
the Jews among the Soviet leaders put to despair those of the Russian Jews
who, despite the cruel iniquities suffered under the tsarist regime, regarded
Russia as the Motherland and led the common life of all Russian intelligentsia,
refusing, in communion with her, any collaboration with the Bolsheviks. 1890
But at the time they had no opportunity of making themselves heard publicly,
and these pages are naturally filled not with their names, but with those of the
conquerors, those who have bridled the course of events.
Two illustrious terrorist acts perpetrated by Jewish arms against the
Bolsheviks in 1918 occupy a special place: the assassination of Uritsky by
Leonid Kannegisser, and the attack on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan. Here too, though
the other way around, was expressed the vocation of the Jewish people to be
always among the first. Perhaps the blows fired at Lenin were rather the result
1887S. Hepshtein, Rousskie sionisty v barbe za Palestinou [The Russian Zionists in the Fight for
Palestine], BJWR-2, pp. 390392.
1888Heifets, 22, 1980, no. 14, p. 162.
1889RJE, t. 2, pp. 276277.
1890Ariadna TyrkovaWilliams, op. cit., p. 299.
of S.R. intentions1891. But, as for Kannegisser (born of hereditary nobility by
his grandfather, he entered the School of Officer Cadets in 1917; by the way, he
was in friendly relations with Sergei Yesenin), I admit full well Mark Aldanovs
explanation: in the face of the Russian people and History, he was moved by the
desire to oppose the names of Uritsky and Zinoviev with another Jewish name.
This is the feeling he expresses in a note transmitted to his sister on the eve of
the attack, in which he says he wants to avenge the peace of BrestLitovsk, that
he is ashamed to see the Jews contribute to install the Bolsheviks in power, and
also avenge the execution of his companion of the School of artillery at the
Cheka of Petrograd.
It should be noted, however, that recent studies have revealed that these two
attacks were perpetrated under suspicious circumstances. 1892 There is strong
presumption that Fanny Kaplan did not shoot Lenin at all, but was apprehended
to close the case: a convenient culprit, by chance. There is also a hypothesis
that the Bolshevik authorities themselves would have created the necessary
conditions for Kannegisser to fire his shot. This I strongly doubt: for what
provocation would the Bolsheviks have sacrificed their beloved child, president
of the Cheka? One thing, however, is troubling: how is it that later, in full Red
Terror, when was attained by force of arms, through the entire country,
thousands of innocent hostages, totally unconnected with the affair, the whole
Kannegisser family was freed from prison and allowed to emigrate We do not
recognise here the Bolshevik claw! Or would it be the intervention of a very
long arm to the highest ranking Soviet instances?A recent publication tells us
that the relatives and friends of L. Kannegisser had even drawn up an armed
attack plan against the Cheka of Petrograd to free their prisoner, and that all, as
soon as they were arrested, were released and remained in Petrograd without
being disturbed. Such clemency on the part of the Bolshevik authorities may be
explained by their concern to avoid ill feelings with the influential Jewish
circles in Petrograd. The Kannegisser family had kept its Judaic faith and
Leonids mother, Rosalia Edouardovna, declared during an interrogation that
her son had fired on Uritsky because he had turned away from Judaism.1893
But here is a Jewish name that has not yet obtained the deserved celebrity:
Alexander Abramovich Vilenkin, hero of the clandestine struggle against the
Bolsheviks. He was a volunteer in the hussars at the age of seventeen, in 1914,
he was decorated four times with the Cross of Saint George, promoted to
officer, then, on the eve of the revolution, he became captain of cavalry; in
1918, he joined the clandestine organisation Union for the Defence of the
Homeland and of Liberty; he was apprehended by the Cheka at the time when,
as the organisation had been discovered, he was delaying the destruction of
compromising documents. Focused, intelligent, energetic, uncompromising
1891Party of Socialists Revolutionaries (SR.).
1892B. Orlov, Mif o Fanni Kaplan [The Myth of Fanny Kaplan], ME, 1975, no. 2; G. Nilov.
Ouritski, Voldarski, and others, Strana i Mir, Munich, 1989, no. 6.
1893Nikola Koniaev, On oubival, slovno pisal stikhotvorenic [He killed as he would have
written verses], Don, pp. 241, 250252.
towards the Bolsheviks, he infused in others the spirit of resistance. Executed
by the Bolsheviksit goes without saying. (The information about him came to
us from his comradeinarms in the underground in 1918, and also from his
cellmate in 1919, Vasily Fyodorovich Klementiev, captain in the Russian
army.1894)
These fighters against Bolshevism, whatever their motivations, we venerate
their memory as Jews. We regret that they were so few, as were too few the
White forces during the civil war.

A very prosaic and entirely new phenomenon reinforced the victory of the
Bolsheviks. These occupied important positions, from which many advantages
resulted, notably the enjoyment in both capitals of vacant apartments freed by
their owners, former aristocrats, now on the run. In these apartments could
live a whole tributary flock of the former Pale of Settlement. This was a real
exodus! G. A. Landau writes: The Jews have climbed the stairs of power and
occupied a few summits From there, it is normal that they brought (as they
do everywhere, in any environment) their relatives, friends, companions from
their youth A perfectly natural process: the granting of functions to people
who are known, trusted, protected, or simply begging for your favours. This
process multiplied the number of Jews in the Soviet state apparatus.1895 We will
not say how many Zinovievs wife, Lilina, thus brought parents and relatives,
nor how Zinoviev distributed positions to his own. They are the focus, but the
influx, not to have been noticed at the moment, was enormous and concerns
tens of thousands of people. The people transmigrated en masse from Odessa to
Moscow. (Is it known that Trotsky himself gratified his father, whom he
moderately loved, of a Sovkhoz in the suburbs of Moscow?)
These migrations can be followed throughout biographies. So that of David
(not to be confused with Mark) Azbel. In 1919, still a kid, he left Chemigov
where he was born to come to Moscow where his two aunts already lived. He
first lived in the house of one of them, Ida, a wealthy merchant of the First
Guild, whose husband had returned from America, and then with the other,
Liolia, who was housed in the First House of the Soviets (The National) with all
the best of the Soviet Union. Their neighbour Ulrich, who would later become
famous, said jokingly: Why dont we open a synagogue in the National where
only Jews live? A whole Soviet elite then left Saint Petersburg to settle in the
Second House of the Soviets (the Metropolis), in the Third (the Seminary,
Bojedomski Street), in the Fourth (Mokhovaya / Vozdvijenka street) and in the
Fifth (Cheremetievski street). These tenants received from a special distribution
centre abundant parcels: Caviar, cheese, butter, smoked sturgeon were never

1894V. F. Klementiev, V bolchevitsko Moskve: 19181920 [In the Moscow of the Bolsheviks],
M., Rousski Pout (Russian Memories, series: Our close past, book 3).
1895Landau, RaJ, p. 110.
lacking on their table (we are in 1920). Everything was special, designed
especially for the new elite: kindergartens, schools, clubs, libraries. (In 1921
22, the year of the murderous famine on the Volga and the help of TARA 1896, in
their model school, the canteen was fed by the ARA foundation and served
American breakfasts: rice pudding, hot chocolate, white bread, and fried eggs.)
And no one remembered that, the day before, it was vociferated in the
classrooms that the bourgeois should be hung high on the lantern. The
children of the neighbouring houses hated those of the Soviet Houses and, at
the first opportunity, went after them.
The NEP came. The tenants of the National then moved into cosy
apartments or pavilions that had previously belonged to aristocrats or bourgeois.
In 1921: spend the summer in Moscow, where you suffocate?, no, you are
invited to an old mansion, now confiscated, in the outskirts of Moscow. There,
everything is in the state, as in the days of the former owners except that
high fences are erected around these houses, that guards are posted at the
entrance Wives of the commissioners began to frequent the best spas of the
West. We see the development, owed to the scarcity of food, of misery and the
concealment of foodstuffs, a secondhand trade and a whole traffic of goods.
Having bought for peanuts an entire lot of commodities from emigrating
merchants, Aunt Ida and Uncle Micha sold them under the table and thus
became probably the richest people in all of Moscow.However, in 1926
they were sentenced to five years imprisonment for economic counter
revolution, to which were added, at the end of the NEP, ten years of camp.1897
Let us also quote: When the Bolsheviks became the government, all
sorts of individuals from the Jewish subproletariat joined them, wishing to get
their share.1898And as free trade and private enterprise were forbidden, many
Jewish families saw their daily lives greatly modified: The middleaged people
were mostly deprived, while the younger ones, rid of all spiritual ballast, by
having social careers, were able to maintain their elders Hence the excessive
number of Jews in the Soviet state apparatus. Note: the author does not justify
this process by calling it a unique issue, but he notes with grief the aspect that
counts: This destructive process did not meet the resistance it would have
required in the Jewish milieu, on the contrary, it found there voluntary
executants and a climate of sympathy.1899
It is thus that many Jews entered the Soviet ruling class.
But could this process, however occult as it was, go unnoticed by the
disadvantaged Russian social strata?
And how could the man in the street react? Either by jeers: Rosa of the
Sovnarkhoz, the husband of Khaka of the Cheka. Or by funny stories, from
those that flooded Russia as early as 1918: Vyssotski tea, Brodsky sugar,
1896American Relief Administration (19191923) the Hoover commission rescued the victims
of the 1922 famine in Russia.
1897D. Azbel, ME, 1989, no. 104, pp. 192196, 199, 203, 209, 223, 225226.
1898V. S. Mandel, RaJ, p. 200.
1899Landau, RaJ, pp. 111112.
Trotsky Russia. And, in Ukraine, it gave: Hop! Harvest Workers / All Jews are
bosses!
And they began to whisper a new slogan: The Soviets without the Jews!
The coauthors of the book of Russia and the Jews became alarmed in
1924: it is clear that not all Jews are Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks are not
Jews, but there is no need today to prove the zealous participation of the Jews in
the martyrdom imposed on an exsanguinate Russia by the Bolsheviks. What we
must, on the contrary, is try to elucidate in a calm manner how this work of
destruction was refracted in the consciousness of the Russian people. The
Russians had never seen any Jews in command before.1900
They now saw them today at every step. Invested with a ferocious and
unlimited power.
To answer the question of Judaisms responsibility in the emergence of
Bolshevik Jews, we must first consider the psychology of nonJews, that of all
these Russians who suffer directly from the atrocities committed The Jewish
actors of public life who wish to prevent any new bloody tragedy, to save the
Jews of Russia from new pogroms, must take account of this fact. 1901 We must
understand the psychology of the Russians who suddenly found themselves
under the authority of an evil, arrogant, rude, selfconfident and impudent
brood.1902
It is not for the purpose of settling accounts that we must remember
History. Nor to reassume mutual accusations. But to understand how, for
example, it was possible for important layers of a perfectly correct Jewish
society to have tolerated an enormous participation of Jews in the rise (1918) of
a State that was not only insensitive to the Russian people, foreign to Russian
history, but which, moreover, inflicted on the population all the outbursts of
terror.
The presence of Jews alongside the Bolsheviks raises questions not
because it would induce a foreign origin to this power. When we speak of the
abundance of Jewish names in revolutionary Russia, we paint a picture of
nothing new: how many Germanic and Baltic names have figured, for a century
and a half to two centuries, in The tsarist administration? The real question is:
in what direction did this power work?
D. S. Pasmanik, however, gives us this reflection: Let all the Russians
who are capable of reflecting ask themselves whether Bolshevism, even with
Lenin at its head, would have triumphed if there had been in Soviet Russia a
satisfied and educated peasantry owning land? Could all the Sages of Zion
gathered together, even with a Trotsky at their head, be able to bring about the
great chaos in Russia?1903 He is right: they could never have done so.

1900I. M. Biekerman, RaJ, p. 22.

1901D. S. Pasmanik, RaJ, p. 212.
1902D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and Judaism],
p. 200.
1903Ibidem, p. 157.
 But the first to ask the question should be the Jews more than the Russians.
This episode of History should call out to them today. The question of the mass
participation of the Jews in the Bolshevik administration and the atrocities
committed by the Jews should be elucidated in a spirit of farsighted analysis of
History. It is not admissible to evade the question by saying: it was the scum,
the renegades of Judaism, we do not have to answer for them.
D. S. Chturmann is right to remind me of my own remarks about the
communist leaders of any nation: they have all turned away from their people
and poured into the inhuman.1904 I believe it. But Pasmanik, was right to write
in the 20s: We cannot confine ourselves to saying that the Jewish people do not
answer for the acts committed by one or the other of its members. We answer
for Trotsky as long as we have not dissociated ourselves from him.1905 Now, to
dissociate oneself does not mean to turn away, on the contrary, it means
rejecting actions, to the end, and learning from them.
I have studied Trotskys biography extensively, and I agree that he did not
have any specifically Jewish attachments, but was rather a fanatical
internationalist. Does this mean that a compatriot like him is easier to
incriminate than the others? But as soon as his star rose, in the autumn of 1917,
Trotsky became, for far too many people, a subject of pride, and for the radical
left of the Jews of America, a true idol.
What can I say of America? But of everywhere else as well! There was a
young man in the camp where I was interned in the 50s, Vladimir Gershuni, a
fervent socialist, an internationalist, who had kept a full conscience of his
Jewishness; I saw him again in the 60s after our release, and he gave me his
notes. I read there that Trotsky was the Prometheus of October for the sole
reason that he was Jewish: He was a Prometheus not because he was born
such, but because he was a child of the Prometheuspeople, this people, who, if
it was not attached to the rock of obtuse wickedness by the chains of a patent
and latent hostility, would have done much more than he did for the good of
humanity.
All historians who deny the participation of Jews in the revolution tend
not to recognise in these Jews their national character. Those, on the contrary,
and especially Israeli historians, who see Jewish hegemony as a victory of the
Judaic spirit, those ones exalt their belonging to Jewishness.1906
It was as early as the 20s, when the civil war ended, that arguments were
made to exonerate the Jews. I. O. Levin reviews them in the collection Russia
and the Jews (the Bolshevik Jews were not so numerous as that there is no
reason why a whole people should respond to the acts of a few, The Jews

1904Dora Chturmann, Gorodou i mirou [Urbi and orbi], ParisNew York, Third Wave, 1988, p.
357.
1905D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and Judaism],
p. 11.
1906Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lgen: Russland und die Juden im 20 Jahrhundert [The
End of Lies: Russia and the Jews in the 20th Century], Berlin, Siedler Verlag, 1992, pp. 99
100.
were persecuted in tsarist Russia, during the civil war the Jews had to flee the
pogroms by seeking refuge with the Bolsheviks, etc.), and he rejected them by
arguing that it was not a matter of criminal responsibility, which is always
individual, but a moral responsibility.1907
Pasmanik thought it impossible to be relieved of a moral responsibility, but
he consoled himself by saying: Why should the mass of the Jewish people
answer for the turpitudes of certain commissioners? It is profoundly unjust.
However, to admit that there is a collective responsibility for the Jews is to
recognise the existence of a Jewish nation of its own. From the moment when
the Jews cease to be a nation, from the day when they are Russians, Germans,
Englishmen of Judaic confession, it is then that they will shake off the shackles
of collective responsibility.1908
Now, the twentieth century has rightly taught us to recognise the Hebrew
nation as such, with its anchorage in Israel. And the collective responsibility of
a people (of the Russian people too, of course) is inseparable from its capacity
to build a morally worthy life.
Yes, they are abounding, the arguments that explain why the Jews stood by
the Bolsheviks (and we will discuss others, very solid, when we talk about the
civil war). Nevertheless, if the Jews of Russia remember this period only to
justify themselves, it will mean that the level of their national consciousness has
fallen, that this consciousness will have lost itself.
The Germans could also challenge their responsibility for the Nazi period
by saying: they were not real Germans, they were the dregs of society, they did
not ask for our opinion But this people answers for its past even in its
ignominious periods. How to respond? By endeavouring to conscientise it, to
understand it: how did such a thing happen? Where lies our fault? Is there a
danger that this will happen again?
It is in this spirit that the Jewish people must respond to their revolutionary
assassins as well as the columns of welldisposed individuals who put
themselves at their service. It is not a question here of answering before other
peoples, but before oneself, before ones conscience and before God. As we
Russians must answer, both for the pogroms, and our incendiary peasants,
insensible to all pity, and for our red soldiers who have fallen into madness, and
our sailors transformed into wild beasts. (I have spoken of them with enough
depth, I believe, in The Red Wheel, and I will add an example here: the Red
Guard A. R. Bassov, in charge of escorting Shingaryov 1909this man passionate
of justice, a popular intercessor, began by collecting money from the sister of
the prisoneras a tip and to finance his transfer from the Peter and Paul fortress
to the Mariinski hospitaland a few hours later, in the same night, he leads to

1907I. O. Levine, RaJ, p. 123.

1908D. S. Pasmanik, p. 198.
190918691918; Publicist, physician, one of the cadet leaders (K.D.). Deputy in the Duma in
1917, shot dead by the terrorists.
the hospital some sailors who coldly shoot down Shingaryov and
Kokochkine.1910 1911 In this individualso many homegrown traits!!)
Answer, yes, as one answers for a member of ones family.
For if we are absolved of all responsibility for the actions of our
compatriots, it is the very notion of nation which then loses all true meaning.

191018711918, jurist, leader of the Cadet party, deputy in the Duma in 1917, also shot down
by the terrorists.
1911A. I. Chingariova, postface to Dnevnik A. Chingariova. Kak eto bylo: Petropavloskaia
krepost [Journal of the fortress Peter and Paul, 27 Nov. 19175 Jan. 1918], 2nd ed., M.,
1918, pp. 6668.
 Chapter 16. During the Civil War

Trotsky once boasted that during the Civil War, even traveling in his special
Revvoyensovets [Revolutionary Military Council] railroad coach, he was able
to find time to acquaint himself with the latest works of French literature.
Not that he realized exactly what he said. He acknowledged that he was
able to find not just time, but room in his heart between appeals to the
revolutionary sailors, forcibly mobilized units of Red Army, and a thrown
order to execute every tenth soldier in a unit that wavered in battle. Well, he
usually did not stay around to supervise carrying out such orders.
Orchestrating a bloody war on the vast plains of Russia, he was absolutely
untouched by the unprecedented sufferings of her inhabitants, by her pain. He
soared aloft, above it all, on the wings of the international intoxication of the
Revolution.
The February Revolution was a Russian revolution: no matter how
headlong, erroneous and pernicious it was, it did not aspire to burn down the
entire pre-existing life, to annihilate the whole pre-revolutionary Russia. Yet
immediately after the October [Bolshevik revolution], the Revolution spilled
abroad and became an international and devastating plague, feeding itself by
devouring and destroying social order wherever it spread everything built
was to be annihilated; everything cultivated to be confiscated; whoever
resisted to be shot. The Reds were exclusively preoccupied with their grand
social experiment, predestined to be repeated, expanded and implemented all
over the world.
From an easy, quick blow, the October coup snowballed into a fierce three-
year-long Civil War, which brought countless bloody calamities to all the
peoples of Russia.
The multinationality of the former Empire and the cannon recoil from the
Great War complicated both the inhumane Bolshevik plot and its
implementation. Unlike the French Revolution, which unfolded on the territory
of mono-national France and did not see much foreign intervention apart from a
short incursion of hostile troops, and with all its horrors being a national affair
from beginning to end, the Russian Revolution was horribly aggravated by its
multinational madness. It saw the strong participation of Red Latvians (then
Russian subjects), former German and Austrian prisoners of war (organized into
full-blown regiments like the Hungarians), and even large numbers of Chinese.
No doubt the brunt of the fighting for the Reds was carried out by Russians;
some of them were drafted on pain of death while others volunteered in a mad
belief they would be fighting for a happy future for themselves. Yet the Russian
Jews were not lost in all that diversity.
The politically active part of Russian Jewry, which backed the Bolshevik
civic regime in 1917, now just as boldly stepped into the military structures of
Bolsheviks. During the first years after the October Revolution in the midst of
the internationalist frenzy, the power over this enormous land was effortlessly
slipping into the hands of those clinging to the Bolsheviks. And they were
overwhelmed by the newfound immensity of that power. They immediately
began using it without a backward glance or any fear of control some,
without doubt, in the name of higher ideals, while others in the name of
lower ones (obstinacy of fanaticism in some and ability to adapt in others 1912).
At that time, nobody could imagine that the Civil War would ignite enormous
Jewish pogroms, unprecedented in their atrocity and bloodshed, all over the
South of Russia.
We can judge the true nature of the multi-ethnic war from the Red pogrom
during the suppression of the Kronstadt Uprising in March 1921. A well-known
socialist-revolutionary and sociologist Pitrim Sorokin writes: For three days,
Latvian, Bashkir, Hungarian, Tatar, Russian, Jewish and international rabble,
crazed by alcohol and the smell of blood, raped and killed without restraint.1913
Or here is another recollection from ordinary witnesses. During the feast of
the Epiphany in 1918, an Orthodox Sacred Procession stirred forth from the
gates of the Kremlin in Tula and an international squad gunned it down.
Even with the ruthless international squads, the force of the Red Guard
alone was no longer sufficient. The Bolshevik regime needed a regular army. In
1918, Lev Trotsky, with the help of Sklyansky and Jacov Sverdlov, created the
Red Army. Many Jews were fighting in its ranks. Some units were entirely
Jewish, like, for example, the brigade of Josef Furman. 1914 The Jewish share in
the command corps the Red Army become large and influential and this trend
continued for many years even after the end of the Civil War. This Jewish
involvement has been researched by several Jewish authors and encyclopedias.
In the 1980s, Israeli scholar Aaron Abramovich used many Soviet sources
(including The Fifty-Year Anniversary of the Soviet Armed Forces, The Soviet
Historical Encyclopedia, volumes of Directives of the Front Command of the
Red Army) to compile detailed nominal rosters of highly ranked Jewish
commanders (exclusively Jewish ones) in the Red Army during the period from
the Civil War up to the aftermath of Second World War.
Lets skim through the pages allocated to the Civil War. 1915 This is a very
extensive roster; it begins with the Revvoyensoviet, where Abramovich lists L.
1912.. . // : .
1 ( ) / . :
YMCA-Press, 1978, . 117 [1- . : , 1924].
1913Pitirim Sorokin. Leaves from a Russian Diary. New York: E.F.Button & Co., 1925, p. 267.
1914 ( ). : , 1976. . 1, .
686.
Trotsky, E. Sklyansky, A. Rosengoltz, and Y. Drabkin-Gusev. Trotsky ordered
the establishment of fronts with headquarters, and formation of new armies,
and Jews were present in almost all the revvoyensoviets of the fronts and
armies. (Abramovich lists the most prominent individuals: D. Vayman, E.
Pyatnitsky, L. Glezarov, L. Pechyorsky, I. Slavin, M. Lisovsky, G. Bitker, Bela
Kun, Brilliant-Sokolnikov, I. Khodorovsky). Earlier, at the onset of the Civil
War, the Extraordinary Command Staff of the Petrograd Military District was
headed by Uritsky, and among the members of the Petrograd Committee of
Revolutionary Defense were Sverdlov (the chairman), Volodarsky, Drabkin-
Gusev, Ya. Fishman (a leftist Socialist Revolutionary) and G. Chudnovsky. In
May 1918 there were two Jews among the eleven commissars of military
districts: E. Yaroslavsky-Gubelman (Moscow District) and S. Nakhimson
(Yaroslavsky District). During the war, several Jews were in charge of armies:
M. Lashevich was in charge of the 3rd and later, of the 7th Army of Eastern
Front; V. Lazarevich was in charge of the 3rd Army of the Western Front, G.
Sokolnikov led the 8th Army of the Southern Front, N. Sorkin the 9th, and I.
Yakir the 14th Army. Abramovich painstakingly lists numerous Jewish heads
of staff and members of the revvoyensoviets in each of the twenty armies; then
the commanders, heads of staff and military commissars of divisions (the list of
the latter, i.e., those in charge of the ideological branch of command, was three-
times longer than the list of Jewish commanders of divisions). In this manner
Abramovich describes brigades, regiments and separate detachments. He lists
Jewish heads of political administrations and revolutionary military tribunals at
all levels, noting that especially large percentage of Jews can be found among
political officers at all levels of the Red Army. Jews played an important
role in the provision and supply services. Lets name some of them. Jews
occupied important positions in military medicine as well: heads of sanitary
administrations of the fronts and armies, senior doctors of units and bodies of
troops. Many Jews commanders of large units and detachments were
distinguished for their courage, heroism and generalship but due to the
synoptic character of this chapter we cannot provide detailed descriptions of the
accomplishments of Jewish Red Army soldiers, commanders and political
officers. (Meticulously listing the commanders of armies, the researcher misses
another Jew, Tikhon Khvesin, who happened to be in charge of the 4th Army of
the Eastern Front, then of the 8th Army of the Southern Front, and later of
the 1st Army of the Turkestan Front.1916)
The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia provides additional information about
some commanders. (Here I would like to commend this encyclopedia (1994),
for in our new free times its authors performed an honest choice writing
frankly about everything, including less than honorable things.)

1915 . :
. 2- . -, 1982. . 1, . 45-61.
1916 ( ). 2- ., . . ., 1997.
. 3, . 285.
 Drabkin-Gusev became the Head of Political Administration of the Red
Army and the Chief of the entire Red Army in 1921. Later he was the head of
IstPart (Commission on the History of October Revolution and Bolshevist
Party) and a big figure in the Comintern, and was buried in the Kremlin wall [in
Moscow].
Mikhail Gaskovich-Lashkevich was a member of many revvoyensoviets,
and later he was in charge of the Siberian Military District, and even later the
First Deputy Chairman of the Revvoyensoviet of the USSR (yet he was buried
merely on the Field of Mars [in St. Petersburg]).
Israel Razgon was the military commissar of the Headquarters of Petrograd
Military District and participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt Uprising;
later, he was in charge of the Red Army of Bukhara, suppressing the uprising in
Central Asia; still later he worked in the Headquarters of the Black See Fleet.
Boris Goldberg was Military Commissar of the Tomskaya Guberniya, later
of the Permskaya Guberniya, still later of the Privolzhskiy Military District, and
even later he was in charge of the Reserve Army and was acknowledged as one
of the founders of Soviet Civil Aviation.
Modest Rubenstein was Deputy Head of the Revvoyensoviet of the Special
Army, and later he was head of political administration of an army group.
Boris Hippo was the Head of Political Administration of the Black Sea
Fleet. (Later he worked in the political administrations of the Baltic Sea Fleet,
the Turkestan Front, was the Head of Political Administration of the Central-
Asian Military District, and later of the Caucasian Army.)
Michail Landa was a head of the political division of an army, later
Deputy Head of Political Administration of the entire Red Army, and still later
Head of Political Administration of the Byelorussian and then of the Siberian
Military Districts.
Lev Berlin was Commissar of the Volga Military Flotilla and later worked
in the Political Administration of the Crimean Army and still later in that of the
Baltic Fleet.1917
Yet how many outstanding characters acted at lower levels?
Boris Skundin, previously a lowly apprentice of clockmaker Sverdlov, Sr.,
successively evolved into the military commissar of a division, commissar of
army headquarters, political inspector of front, and, finally, into Deputy Head of
Political Administration of the 1st Cavalry Army.
Avenir Khanukaev was commander of a guerilla band who later was tried
before the revolutionary tribunal for crimes during the capture of Ashgabat and
acquitted, and in the same year of 1919 was made into political plenipotentiary
of the TurkCommission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the
Soviet of Peoples Commissars on Kashgar, Bukhara and Khiva.
Moses Vinnitsky (Mishka-Yaponchik) was a member of the Jewish
militia squad in Odessa 1905, and later a gang-leader; he was freed from a hard
labor camp by the February Revolution and became a commander of a Jewish
1917, . 1, . 122, 340, 404, 515; . 2, . 120, 126, 434, 511.
fighting brigade in Odessa, simultaneously managing the entire criminal
underworld of Odessa. In 1919 he was a commander of a special battalion and
later he was in charge of an infantry regiment in the Red Army. His unit was
composed of anarchists and criminals. In the end he was shot by his own side.
Military commissar Isaiah Tzalkovich was in command of a composite
company of the [Red] cadets during the suppression of the Kronstadt
Uprising.1918
We can see extraordinary Jewish women in the higher Bolshevik ranks as
well.
Nadezda Ostrovskaya rose from the Head of Gubkom [Party Committee of
a Guberniya, the highest executive authority in a guberniya] of Vladimir
Guberniya to the post of the Head of Political Administration of the entire 10th
Army.
Revekka Plastinina headed Gubrevkom and later the Gubkom of Archangel
Guberniya.
Is it proper to mention here Cecilia Zelikson-Bobrovskaya, who was a
seamstress in her youth, and became the Head of the Military Department of the
Moscow Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks? 1919 Or
take one of the Furies of the Revolution Eugenia Bosh (or her sister Elena
Rozmirovich)?
Or another thing the Soviets used the phrase Corps of Red Cossacks.
Yet those were not Cossacks who embraced communist ideology but plain
bandits (who occasionally disguised themselves as Whites for deception). Those
Cossack Corps were made of all nationalities from Romanians to Chinese
with a full-blown Latvian cavalry regiment. A Russian, Vitaly Primakov, was in
command and its Political Department was headed by I. I. Minz (by Isaac
Greenberg in the Second Division) and S. Turovskiy was head of the
Headquarters. A. Shilman was the head of operative section of the staff, S.
Davidson managed the division newspaper, and Ya. Rubinov was in charge of
the administrative section of the staff.1920
Since we began particularizing lets look at the famous leaders of the Red
Army, at those never-fading names: Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vasily
Blucher, Semyon Budyonny, Klim Voroshilov, Boris Dumenko, Pavel Dybenko,
Aleksa Dundich, Dmitry Zhloba, Vasily Kikvidze, Epifan Kovtukh, Grigory
Kotovsky, Philip Mironov, Mikhail Muravyov, Vitaly Primakov, Ivan Sorokin,
Semyon Timoshenko, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Ieronim Uborevich, Mikhail
Frunze, Vasily Chapaev, Yefim Shchadenko, Nikolay Shchors. Why, couldnt
they pull it off without Jews?
Or take hundreds and thousands of Russian generals and officers of the
former Imperial Army, who served in the Red Army, though not in the political
sections (they were not invited there), but in other significant posts. True, they

1918, . 3, . 61, 278, 305, 503.

1919, . 1, . 144; . 2, . 354, 388-389.
1920 : : [.] .: , 1969.
had a commissar with a gun behind them, and many served on pain of execution
of their hostage families especially in case of military failures. Yet they gave an
invaluable advantage to the Reds, which actually might have been crucial for
the eventual victory of Bolsheviks. Why, just about half of the officers of the
General Staff worked for the Bolsheviks.1921
And we should not forget that initial and fatal susceptibility of many
Russian peasants (by no means all of them, of course) to Bolshevik propaganda.
Shulgin flatly noted: Death to the Bourgeois was so successful in Russia
because the smell of blood inebriates, alas, so many Russians; and they get into
a frenzy like wild beasts.1922
Yet lets avoid going into another unreasonable extreme, such as the
following: The most zealous executioners in Cheka were not at all the
`notorious Jews, but the recent minions of the throne, generals and officers. 1923
As though they would be tolerated in there, in the Cheka! They were invited
there with the only one purpose to be executed. Yet why such a quick-
temper? Those Jews, who worked in the Cheka, were, of course, not the
notorious Jews, but quite young and committed ones, with revolutionary
garbage filling their heads. And I deem that they served not as executioners but
mostly as interrogators.
The Cheka (Extraordinary Commission, Che-Ka) was established in
December 1917. It instantly gained strength and by the beginning of 1918 it was
already filling the entire populace with mortal fear. In fact, it was the Cheka that
started the Red Terror long before its beginning was officially announced on
September 5, 1918. The Cheka practiced terror from the moment of its
inception and continued it long after the end of the Civil War. By January of
1918, the Cheka was enforcing the death penalty on the spot without
investigation and trial. Then the country saw the snatching of hundreds and
later thousands of absolutely innocent hostages, their mass executions at night
or mass drowning in whole barges. Historian S. P. Melgunov, who himself
happened to experience perilous incarceration in Cheka prisons, unforgettably
reflected upon the whole epic story of the Red Terror in his famous book
Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923.
There was not a single town or a district without an office of the
omnipotent All-Russian Extraordinary Commission [that is, the Cheka], which
from now on becomes the main nerve of state governance and absorbs the last
vestiges of law; there was not a single place (in the RSFSR [Russian
Federation]) without ongoing executions; a single verbal order of one man
(Dzerzhinsky) doomed to immediate death many thousand people. And even
when investigation took place, the Chekists [members of the Cheka] followed
their official instructions: Do not look for evidence incriminating a suspect in
1921.. . : [
.. ]. , 1929, . 145.
1922 , . 157.
1923. . // : ,
. , 1924, 1 , . 3.
hostile speech or action against Soviet power. The very first question you should
ask him is about the social class he belongs to, and what is his descent,
upbringing, education and profession. It is these questions that should determine
the suspects fate (the words of M. Latsis in the bulletin Red Terror on
November 1, 1918 and in Pravda on December 25, 1918). Melgunov notes:
Latsis was not original here, he simply rephrased the words of Robespierre in
Convent about the mass terror: `To execute the enemies of the Fatherland, it is
sufficient to establish their identities. Not punishment but elimination is
required. Directives from the center are picked up and distributed all over
Russia by the Cheka Weekly and Melgunov cites the periodical profusely: Red
Sword is published in Kiev in an editorial by Lev Krainy we read: `Old
foundations of morality and humanity invented by the bourgeoisie do not and
cannot exist for us. A. certain Schwartz follows: `The proclaimed Red Terror
should be implemented in a proletarian way If physical extermination of all
servants of Tsarism and capitalism is the prerequisite for the establishment of
the worldwide dictatorship of proletariat, then it wouldnt stop us.1924
It was a targeted, pre-designed and long-term Terror. Melgunov also
provides estimates of the body count of that unheard-of swing of murders
(precise numbers were practically not available then). Yet, I suppose these
horrors pale into insignificance with respect to the number of victims if
compared to what happened in the South after the end of the Civil War.
Denikins [the general of the White army in command of the South Russian
front] rule was crumbling. New power was ascending, accompanied by a bloody
reign of vengeful terror, of mere retaliation. At this point it was not a civil war,
it was physical liquidation of a former adversary. There were waves and waves
of raids, searches, new raids and arrests. Entire wards of prisoners are escorted
out and every last man is executed. Because of the large number of victims, a
machine-gun is used; they execute 15-16-years-old children and 60-years-old
elders. The following is a quote from a Cheka announcement in the Kuban
region: Cossack villages and settlements, which give shelter to Whites and
Greens [Ukrainian nationalists], will be destroyed, the entire adult population
executed, and all property confiscated. After Wrangel [another White
general] left, Crimea was dubbed the `All-Russian Cemetery (different
estimates suggest the number of murdered as between 120,000 and 150,000).
In Sevastopol people were not just shot but hanged, hanged by dozens and
even by hundreds, Nakhimov Prospect [a major street] was lined with the
corpses of the hanged people arrested on the streets and hastily executed
without trial. Terror in the Crimea continued through 1921.1925
But no matter how deep we dig into the history of Cheka, special
departments, special squads, too many deeds and names will remain unknown,
covered by the decomposed remnants of witnesses and the ash of incinerated

1924.. . , 1918-1923. 2- . . : ,
1924, . 43, 48, 57, 70-71, 72-73.
1925 , . 50, 99, 100, 105, 109, 113.
Bolshevik documents. Yet even the remaining documents are overly eloquent.
Here is a copy of a secret Extract from the protocol of a meeting of the
Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party
of Bolsheviks dated by April 18, 1919, obtained from the Trotsky archive at
Columbia University.
Attended cc.[comrades] Lenin, Krestinsky, Stalin, Trotsky.
Heard: 3. Statement of c. Trotsky that Jews and Latvians constitute a
huge percentage of officials in the front-line Chekas, front-line and rear area
executive commissions and central Soviet agencies, and that their percentage in
the front-line troops is relatively small, and that because of this, strong
chauvinist agitation is conducted among the Red Army soldiers with certain
success, and that, according to c. Trotskys opinion, it is necessary to
redistribute the Party personnel to achieve a more uniform representation of
officials of all nationalities between front-line and rear areas.
Decided: To propose cc. Trotsky and Smilga to draft an appropriate
Directive of the Central Committee to the commissions responsible for the
allotment of cadres between the central and local Soviet organizations and the
front.1926
Yet it is hard to believe that the meeting produced the intended effect. A
contemporary researcher, the first who approached the problem of the role and
place of Jews (and other ethnic minorities) in Soviet machinery, studied
declassified archive documents and concluded that at the initial stage of
activity of the punitive agencies, during the `Red Terror, national minorities
constituted approximately 50% of the central Cheka apparatus, with their
representation on the major posts reaching 70%.1927 The author provides
September 25, 1918 statistical data: among the ethnic minorities numerous
Latvians and fairly numerous Poles the Jews are quite noticeable, especially
among major and active Cheka officials, i.e., commissars and investigators.
For instance, among the investigators of the Department of Counter-
Revolutionary Activities the most important Cheka department half were
Jews.1928
Below are the service records of several Chekists of the very first call (from
the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia).1929
Veniamin Gerson was in the Cheka from 1918, and from 1920 he was a
personal referent to Dzerzhinsky.
Israel Leplevsky, a former member of Bund, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917
and worked in the Cheka from 1918; he was the head of the State Political

1926Columbia University, New York, Trotskys Archive, bMs Russ 13 T-160, :

9 1919 ., . 9.
1927.. . - 20- //
: / .-. .. . ;
: , 1999, . 321, 344.
1928.. . - 20- //
, . 327-329.
1929, . 1, . 106, 124, 223, 288; . 2, . 22, 176, 302, 350, 393; . 3, . 374, 473.
Directorate [formed from the Cheka in 1922] of the Podolsk Guberniya and
later of the Special Department of Odessa. And he climbed all the way up to the
post of head of the OGPU [Joint State Political Directorate, the successor to the
Cheka] of USSR! Later he occupied posts of Narkom of Internal Affairs of
Byelorussia and Uzbekistan.
Zinovy Katznelson became a Chekist immediately after the October
Revolution; later he was a head of special departments in several armies, and
then of the entire Southern Front. Still later we can see him in the highest ranks
in the Cheka headquarters, and even later at different times he was in charge of
the Cheka of the Archangel Guberniya, the Transcaucasian Cheka, the North
Caucasus GPU, the Kharkov GPU [another Cheka-successor secret police
organization]; he also was deputy to the Narkom of Internal Affairs of Ukraine
and deputy head of the entire GULag [that is, the government agency that
administered the main Soviet penal labor camp systems].
Solomon Mogilevsky was chair of the Ivano-Voznesensk tribunal in 1917,
then in charge of Cheka in Saratov. Later we find him again in an army tribunal;
and after that he was in succession: deputy head of the Bureau of Investigations
of the Moscow Cheka, head of Foreign Affairs Department of Cheka
headquarters, and head of the Cheka of Transcaucasia.
Did Ignaty Vizner contemplate the scale of his actions when he investigated
the case of Nicolay Gumilev? Not likely he was too busy. He served in the
Special Section at the Presidium of Cheka headquarters, he was the founder of
the Bryansk Cheka, and later he was an investigator in the case of the Kronstadt
Uprising and a special plenipotentiary of the Presidium of the Cheka-GPU on
cases of special importance.
Lev Levin-Velsky, former member of the Bund [a Jewish socialist labor
organization], was in charge of the Cheka of the Simbirsk Guberniya in 1918-
1919, later of the Special Department of the 8th Army, still later of the Cheka
of the Astrakhan Guberniya. Beginning in 1921, he was an envoy
plenipotentiary of the central Cheka in the Far East, and later, from 1923, an
envoy plenipotentiary of the OGPU in Central Asia. Still later, from the
beginning of 1930, he worked in the Moscow OGPU. (And even later in his
career he was deputy Narkom of Internal Affairs of the USSR.)
Or consider Nahum (Leonid) Etington: active in the Cheka beginning in
1919, later head of the Cheka of the Smolensk Guberniya; still later he worked
in the GPU of Bashkiria; it was he who orchestrated the assassination of
Trotsky.
Isaak (Semyon) Schwartz: in 1918-1919 he was the very first chair of the
All-Ukranian Cheka. He was succeeded by Yakov Lifshitz who beginning in
1919 was the head of the Secret Operations Division and simultaneously a
deputy head of the Cheka of the Kiev Guberniya; later he was deputy head of
the Cheka of the Chernigov Guberniya, and still later of the Kharkov
Guberniya; and even later he was in charge of the Operative Headquarters of the
All-Ukrainian Cheka; still later, in 1921-1922, he ran the Cheka of the Kiev
Guberniya.
Lets look at the famous Matvei Berman. He began his career in a
districtCheka in the North Urals; in 1919 he was assigned as deputy dead of the
Cheka of the Yekaterinburg Guberniya, from 1920 head of Cheka of Tomsk
Guberniya, from 1923 of the Buryat-Mongolian Guberniya, from 1924
Deputy Head of the OGPU of all of Central Asia, from 1928 head of the
OGPU of Vladivostok, from 1932 head of the entire GULag and
simultaneously a deputy Narkom of the NKVD [a successor organization to the
Cheka, GPU and OGPU] (from 1936). (His brother Boris was in the State
Intelligence Organs since 1920; in 1936 he served as deputy head of foreign
intelligence section in the NKVD.) Boris Pozern, a commissar of the Petrograd
Commune, substantially contributed to matching images of a Jew and that of a
Chekist in peoples minds; on September 2, 1918, he co-signed the
proclamation on Red Terror with Zinoviev and Dzerzhinsky. (The
Encyclopedia missed one Aleksandr Ioselevich, secretary of the Petrograd
Cheka, who had co-signed the Red Terror execution lists with Gleb Bokiy in
September, 1918.)
Yet there were others, even more famous individuals. For instance, Yakov
Agranov, a Chekist, phenomenally successful in conducting repressions; he
invented Tagantzevs Conspiracy (through which he had killed Gumilev); he
directed cruel interrogations of participants of the Kronstadt Uprising. Or take
notorious Yakov Blumkin, who participated in the assassination of the German
ambassador in 1918; he was arrested and later amnestied, and then served in
Trotskys secretariat, and later in Mongolia, Transcaucasia, the Middle East,
and was shot in 1929.
And there were numerous personnel behind every Cheka organizer. And
hundreds and thousands of innocents met them during interrogations, in
basements and during the executions.
There were Jews among the victims too. Those who suffered from the
massive communist onslaught on the bourgeoisie were mostly merchants. In
the Maloarkhangelsk District, a merchant (Yushkevich) was placed on a red-hot
cast-iron stove by members of a communist squad for failure to pay taxes.
(From the same source: some peasants, who defaulted on the surplus
appropriation system, were lowered on ropes into water wells to simulate
drowning; or, during the winter, they froze people into ice pillars for failure to
pay revolutionary taxes. The particular sort of punishment depended on the
imagination of the executioners.1930) Similarly, Korolenko described how two
millers, named Aronov and Mirkin, were extrajudicially shot for not complying
with absurd communist-mandated prices on flour.1931 Or here is another

1930.. . ( ..). :
, 1922. . 2, . 193.
1931.. . .. : , 1917-1921 / .
.. . : , 1990, . 151-154, 232-236.
example. In 1913, former Kiev Governor Sukovkin advocated innocence of
Beilis [during Beilis Trial]. When the Reds came, he was arrested. Thousands
of Jews in Kiev signed a petition on his behalf, yet the Cheka had shot him
nevertheless.
How then can we explain that the Russian populace generally regarded the
new terror as Jewish terror? Look how many innocent Jews were accused of
that. Why was the perception that Chekists and Jews were all but the same so
widespread among both the Reds and the Whites alike and among the people in
general? Who is responsible for that? Many. And the White Army is also
responsible as we discuss below. Yet not the least among these reasons is
because of the Chekists themselves, who facilitated this identification by their
ardent service on the highest posts in Cheka.
Today we hear bitter complaints that it was not only Jews who clung to the
power, and why any particular clemency should be expected from the Jewish
Chekists? True. These objections, however, cannot alter the harsh certitude: the
incredibly enormous power on an unimaginable scale had come into the hands
of those Jewish Chekists, who at that time were supreme, by status and rank,
representatives of Russian Jewry (no matter how horribly it sounds). And those
representatives (again, not elected by their own people) were not capable of
finding enough self-restraint and self-scrutinizing sobriety to come around,
check themselves, and opt out. It is like the Russian cautionary proverb: Ah,
do not hurry to grab, first blow on your fingers And the Jewish people (who
did not elect those Chekists as their representatives), that already numerous and
active city-dwelling community (werent there prudent elders among them?)
also failed to stop them: be careful, we are a small minority in this country! (Yet
who listened to elders in that age?)
G. Landau writes: Loss of affiliation with a social class overthrew the fine
structure of Jewish society and destroyed the inner forces of resistance and even
that of stability, sending even them under the chariot of triumphant
Bolshevism. He finds that apart from the ideas of socialism, separatist
nationalism, and permanent revolution, we were astonished to find among the
Jews what we never expected from them cruelty, sadism, unbridled violence
everything that seemed so alien to a people so detached from physical
activity; those who yesterday couldnt handle a rifle, today were among the
vicious cutthroats.1932
Here is more about the aforementioned Revekka Plastinina-Maizel from
the Archangel Guberniya Cheka: Infamous for her cruelty all over the north of
Russia, [she] voluntarily `perforated napes and foreheads and personally
shot more than one hundred men. Or about one Baka who was nicknamed `a
bloody boy for his youth and cruelty first in Tomsk and then as the head
of the Cheka of the Irkutsk Guberniya.1933 (Plastininas career carried her up

1932.. . // , . 117-118.
1933.. , . 196.
right to a seat in the Supreme Court of RSFSR which she occupied in 1940s. 1934)
Some may recall the punitive squad of Mandelbaum in Archangel in the north
of Russia, others the squad of Mishka-Yaponchik in Ukraine.
What would you expect from peasants in the Tambov Guberniya if, during
the heat of the suppression of the great peasant uprising in this Central-Russian
black-earth region, the dismal den of the Tambov Gubcom was inhabited by
masterminds of grain allotments, secretaries of Gubcom P. Raivid and Pinson
and by the head of the propaganda department, Eidman? (A. G. Shlikhter,
whom we remember from Kiev in 1905, was there as well, this time as the
chairman of the Executive Committee of the guberniya.) Y. Goldin was the
Foodstuffs Commissar of the Tambov Guberniya; it was he who triggered the
uprising by exorbitant confiscations of grain, whereas one N. Margolin,
commander of a grain confiscation squad, was famous for whipping the
peasants who failed to provide grain. (And he murdered them too.) According to
Kakurin, who was the chief of staff to Tukhachevsky, a plenipotentiary
representative of the Cheka headquarters in the Tambov Guberniya during that
period was Lev Levin. Of course, not only Jews were in it! However, when
Moscow took the suppression of the uprising into her own hands in February
1921, the supreme command of the operation was assigned to Efraim
Sklyansky, the head of Interdepartmental Anti-Banditry Commission, and
so the peasants, notified about that with leaflets, were able to draw their own
conclusions.
And what should we say about the genocide on the river Don, when
hundreds of thousands of the flower of Don Cossacks were murdered? What
should we expect from the Cossack memories when we take into consideration
all those unsettled accounts between a revolutionary Jew and a Don Cossack?
In August 1919, the Volunteer Army took Kiev and opened several Chekas
and found the bodies of those recently executed; Shulgin 1935 composed nominal
lists of victims using funeral announcements published in the reopened
Kievlyanin; one cant help noticing that almost all names were Slavic it was
the chosen Russians who were shot. Materials produced by the Special
Investigative Commission in the South of Russia provide insights into the Kiev
Cheka and its command personnel (based on the testimony of a captured Cheka
interrogator)1936: The headcount of the `Cheka staff varied between 150 and
300 percentage-wise, there was 75% Jews and 25% others, and those in
charge were almost exclusively Jews. Out of twenty members of the
Commission, i.e., the top brass who determined peoples destinies, fourteen
were Jews. All detained were kept either in the `Cheka building or in the
Lukyanovs prison. A special shed was fitted for executions in the building on
Institutskaya St. 40, on the corner with Levashovskaya St., where the main
1934, . 2, . 388-389.
1935.. , , . 313-318.
1936 ( . ) //
: - / . ... :
; : , 1925. . 9, . 111-141.
`Cheka office of the guberniya had moved from Ekaterininskaya St. An
executioner (and sometimes `amateur Chekists) escorted a completely naked
victim into a shed and ordered the victim to fall facedown on the ground. Then
he finished the victim with a shot in the back of the head. Executions were
performed using revolvers (typically Colts). Usually because of the short
distance, the skull of the executed person exploded into fragments. The next
victim was similarly escorted inside and laid down nearby. When number of
victims was exceeding the capacity of the shed, new victims were laid down
right upon the dead or were shot at the entrance of the shed. Usually the
victims went to their execution without resistance.
This is what the people were whispering about. Or take another incident,
witnessed by Remizov (whom it is hard to suspect of anti-Semitism given his
revolutionary-democratic past): Recently there was a military training nearby,
at the Academy, and one Red Army soldier said: `Comrades, lets not go to the
front, it is all because of Yids that we fight! And someone with a brief-case
asked him: `Which regiment are you from? And the soldier again: `Comrades,
lets not go to the front, it is all because of Yids! And that one with a briefcase
ordered: `Shoot him! Then two other Red Army soldiers came out and the first
one tried to flee. But he didnt make it to the corner as others got him and shot
him his brain spilled over and there was a pool of blood.1937
The Kronstadt Uprising had distinctly anti-Jewish character (and so all the
more was it doomed): they destroyed portraits of Trotsky and Zinoviev [both
Jewish], but not those of Lenin. And Zinoviev didnt have guts to go to
negotiate with the rebels he would be torn into pieces. So they sent Kalinin
[Russian].
There were labor strikes in Moscow in February 1921 that had the slogan:
Down with Communists and Jews!
We have already mentioned that during the Civil War the majority of
Russian socialists (and there were numerous Jews among them) were, of course,
on Lenins side, not on Admiral Kolchaks and some of them actually fought for
the Bolsheviks. (For example, consider Bund member Solomon Schwartz:
during the period of the provisional government, he was a director of a
department in a ministry; during the Civil War he volunteered to the Red Army
though he did not indicate his rank; later he emigrated abroad where he
published two books about the Jewish situation in the USSR; we will cite him
below.)
Thus it looked as though not only Bolshevik Jews, but all of Jewry had
decided to take the Red side in the Civil War. Could we claim that their choice
was completely deliberate? No. Could we claim that they didnt have any other
choice? Again, no.
Shulgin describes the enormous exodus from Kiev on October 1, 1919 as
the city was to be surrendered to Bolsheviks. It was an entirely Russian exodus,
people were leaving on foot with knapsacks, across the bridges over Dnepr
1937 . . London: Overseas Publications, 1979, . 376-377.
river; he estimated their numbers at around 60,000. There were no Jews in this
exodus: they were not noticeable among those many thousands of Russians
(men, women and children), with bundles in their hands streaming across the
beautiful Chain Bridge under a sorrowful net of rain. There were more than
100,000 Jews in Kiev at that time, Shulgin writes. And all of those rich and very
rich Jews they didnt leave, they chose to stay and wait for arrival of
Bolsheviks. The Jews decided not to share their fate with us. And with that
they carved a new and possibly the deepest divide between us.1938
So it was in many other places. According to the testimony of socialist-
revolutionary S. Maslov: It is a fact that in towns and cities of southern Russia,
especially in cities to the west of the Dnepr that changed hands repeatedly, the
arrival of Soviets was most celebrated and the most of hollow sympathy was
expressed in the Jewish quarters, and not infrequently only in those alone.1939
A contemporary American historian (Bruce Lincoln, author of a big treatise
about our Civil War) said that the entire Ukrainian Cheka was composed of
almost 80% by Jews, that can be explained by the fact that, prior to arrival of
the Reds, cruel pogroms went on non-stop; indeed those were the bloodiest
pogroms since the times of Bogdan Khmelnytsky [leader of the Cossack
rebellion in Ukraine in 1648-1657].1940 We will discuss the pogroms soon,
though it should be noted that the time sequence was actually the opposite:
those 80% [Jews] were already staffing the Cheka in 1918, whereas the
Petliuras [a Ukrainian publicist, writer, journalist who was head of state during
the Ukrainian independence of 1918-1920] pogroms only gathered momentum
during 1919 (the pogroms by White Army troops began in the fall of 1919).
Yet it is impossible to answer the eternal question who is the guilty party,
who pushed it into abyss. Of course, it is incorrect to say that the Kiev Cheka
did what it did because it was three-quarters Jewish. Still, this is something that
Jewish people should remember and reflect upon.
And yes, there were Jews then who appealed to their compatriots looking
back on the tragedy that had befallen both Russia and Russian Jewry. In their
proclamation To the Jews of all countries!, this group wrote in 1923 that overly
zealous participation of Jewish Bolsheviks in the oppression and destruction of
Russia is blamed upon all of us the Soviet rule is identified with Jewish
rule, and fierce hatred of Bolsheviks turns into the equally fierce hatred of
Jews. [We] firmly believe that Bolshevism is the worst of all evils possible
for the Jews and all other peoples of Russia, and that to fight tooth and nail
against the rule of that international rabble over Russia is our sacred duty before
humankind, culture, before our Motherland and the Jewish people. 1941 Yet the

1938.. , . 95-96.
1939.. , . 44.
1940 . .: .. , //
: . -
, 1990, 109, . 134.
1941, . 6, 7.
Jewish community reacted to these declarations with great indignation. 1942
(We will discuss it in the next chapter.)

The Civil War spilled over Russias borders. Lets review that briefly (though
the events in Europe are outside of the scope of this book).
The Bolsheviks invaded Poland in 1920. (At this point they had recalled
and adroitly used the Russian national longing and national enthusiasm as
Nahamkis-Steklov put it in an Izvestia editorial.1943) And it appears that Polish
Jews met the Red Army very warmly. According to a Soviet source, whole
battalions of Jewish workers participated in the fighting at Minsk. 1944 Reading
from the Jewish Encyclopedia: on numerous occasions, Poles accused Jews of
supporting the enemy, of `anti-Polish, `pro-Bolshevist and even `pro-
Ukrainian attitudes. During the Soviet-Polish war many Jews were killed [by
Polish Army] on charges of spying for the Red Army. 1945 However, we should
be wary of possible exaggerations here as we remember similar accusations in
espionage made by Russian military authorities during the war, in 1915.
The Soviets quickly formed a revolutionary government for Poland
headed by F. Dzerzhinsky. In it were Y. Markhlevsky and F. Kon. Of course,
they were surrounded by blood work specialists and ardent propagandists.
(Among the latter we see a former pharmacist from Mogilev A. I. Rotenberg.
Soon after the aborted Red revolution in Poland, he, together with Bela Kun and
Zalkind-Zemlyachka, went on to conduct the deadly cleansing of the Crimea.
In 1921 he participated in that glorious work again this time purging
Georgia, again under the direct command of Dzerzhinsky. At the end of 1920s
Rotenberg was in charge of the Moscow NKVD.)
Not only Poland but Hungary and Germany as well were affected by the
Red Revolution. An American researcher writes: the intensity and tenacity of
anti-Semitic prejudice in both the east and the center of Europe was
significantly influenced by Jewish participation in the revolutionary
movement. In the beginning of 1919, the Soviets, under predominantly
Jewish leadership, started revolutions in Berlin and Munich, and the share of
activist Jews was disproportionately high in the German Communist Party of
that period, though that partys support in the Jewish community at large was
not significant. Four out of eleven members of the Central Committee were
Jews with a university education. In December 1918, one of them, Rosa
Luxemburg, wrote: In the name of the greatest aspirations of humankind, our
motto when we deal with our enemies is: Finger into the eye, knee on the
chest! Rebellion in Munich was led by a theater critic, Kurt Eisner, a Jew of
1942.. . // , . 100.
1943. . // , 1920, 18 ,
. 1.
1944. . . .; .: , 1929, .31.
1945, 6, .646; . 1, . 326.
bohemian appearance. He was killed, but the power in conservative and
Catholic Bavaria was seized by a new government made up of leftist
intellectual Jews, who proclaimed the `Bavarian Soviet Republic(G.
Landauer, E. Toller, E. Muhsam, O. Neurath) In a week the republic was
overthrown by an even more radical group, which declared the Second
Bavarian Soviet Republic with Eugen Levine at the helm. 1946 Lets read an
article about him in the Encyclopedia: born into merchant Jewish family, he
used to be a socialist-revolutionary; he participated in the [Russian] revolution
of 1905, later became German national, joined the Spartacist movement of R.
Luxemburg and K. Liebknecht, and now he became the head of the Communist
government in Bavaria, which also included the abovementioned E. Muhsam,
E. Toller and a native of Russia, M. Levin.1947 The uprising was defeated in May
1919. The fact that the leaders of the suppressed Communist revolts were Jews
was one of the most important reasons for the resurrection of political anti-
Semitism in contemporary Germany.1948
While Jews played a quite conspicuous role in the Russian and
German communist revolutions, their role in Hungary became central. Out of
49 Peoples Commissars there, 31 were Jews, Bela Kun being the most
prominent of them; the foreign minister (de-facto head of government), he
would orchestrate a bloodbath in the Crimea half a year later. Here we find
Matyas Rakosi, Tibor Szamuely, Gyorgy Lukacs. Granted, the prime-minister
was a gentile, Sandor Garbai, but Rakosi later joked that Garbai was elected
because someone had to sign execution orders on Sabbath days. Statues of
Hungarian kings and heroes were knocked off their pedestals, the national
anthem outlawed, and wearing the national colors criminalized. The tragedy
of the situation was escalated by the fact that historically Hungarian Jews were
much wealthier than their Eastern-European countrymen and were much more
successful in Hungarian society.1949
The direct relation between the Hungarian Soviet Republic and our Civil
War becomes more clear by the virtue of the fact that special Red Army Corps
were being prepared to go to the rescue of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, but
they couldnt manage it in time and the Republic fell (in August 1919).

The breakdown of the universally hated Russian Empire cost all involved
dearly, including the Jews. G. Landau writes: In general, revolution is
gruesome, risky and dangerous business. It is especially gruesome and
dangerous for a minority, which in many ways is alien to the bulk of
1946. . :
// 22: -
. -, 1990, 73, . 96, 99-100.
1947, . 4, . 733-734.
1948. . // 22, 1990, 73, . 99.
1949 , . 100-101.
population. To secure their wellbeing, such minority should unwaveringly
cling to law and rely on unshakable continuity of social order and on the inertia
of statutory power. Forces of revolutionary misalignment and permissiveness hit
such a minority particularly hard.1950
It was looming straight forward, into the so promising future! Yet in the
near future, during the Civil War, there was no law and Jewry was hit by
pillages and pogroms on the scale not even close to anything they experienced
in days of the Tsar. And those pogroms were launched not by the White side.
Because of the density of the Jewish population in Ukraine, it was inevitable
that a third force, apart from the Reds and Whites, would interfere in the Jewish
destinies that of Ukrainian separatism.
In April 1917, when the Ukrainian Rada [upper house of parliament]
assembled for the first time, Jewry did not yet believe in the victory of
Ukrainian Nationalism, and that was manifested in the character of their voting
during municipal summer elections: Jews did not have any reason to vote for
Ukrainian separatists.1951 But already in June, when something resembling real
independent Ukrainian governance was taking shape under which apparently
the Jews would have to live from now on the Jewish representatives entered
the Lesser [lower] Rada, and a Vice-Secretariat on Jewish nationality (Jewish
Ministry) was established. The latter worked on the long-cherished project of
Jewish National Autonomy (according to which every nationality and now
the Jewish one, creates its own national union, which can legislate according to
the needs and interests of their nation and for that it receives financial support
from the treasury, and a representative of the union becomes a member of the
cabinet). Initially, the formative Ukrainian government was generally
benevolent toward Jews, but by the end of 1917 the mood changed, and the bill
on autonomy was met in the Rada with laughter and contempt; nevertheless, in
January 1918, it was passed, though with difficulties. For their part, the Jews
reluctantly accepted the Third Universal (November 9, 1917, the initiation of
Ukrainian independence from Russia) as now they feared anarchy, traditionally
dangerous for Jewish populations, and were afraid of a split within Russian
Jewry. Still, Jewish philistines were making fun of the Ukrainian language and
shop-signs, were afraid of Ukrainian nationalism, and believed in the Russian
state and Russian culture.1952 Lenin wrote: Jews, like Great Russians, ignore
the significance of the national question in Ukraine.1953
However, everything pointed toward secession and the Jewish delegates in
the Rada did not dare to vote against the Fourth Universal (January 11, 1918, on
complete secession of Ukraine). Immediately thereafter, the Bolsheviks began
an offensive against Ukraine. The first Ukrainian Central Committee of the
Ukrainian Communist Party of Bolsheviks was formed in Moscow and later
1950.. . // , . 115.
1951.. . (1917-1919) //
*, 1917-1967 ( -2). -: , 1968, . 22.
1952 , . 29, 30, 35.
1953.. . : 45 . 4- . .: , 1941-1967. . 30, . 246.
moved to Kharkov; it was headed by Georgiy Pyatakov and among its members
were Semyon Schwartz and Serafima Gopner. When by the end of January 1918
they moved to Kiev, Grigory Chudnovsky took the post of the Commissar of
Kiev, Kreitzberg became a commissar of finances, D. Raikhstein press
commissar, Shapiro commissar of the army. There was no shortage of
Jewish names among the top Bolsheviks in such centers as Odessa and
Ekaterinoslav. That was sufficient to fuel talks about Bolshevik Jews and
Jewish Bolsheviks among the troops loyal to the Rada. Verbal cursing about
traitorous Jews became almost commonplace; in the very midst of street
fighting [for Kiev], the Zionist fraction produced an official inquiry on the
matter of anti-Jewish excesses. The question turned into a verbal skirmish
between Ukrainian delegates and representatives of national minorities.1954
Thus enmity split apart the Jews and the Ukrainian separatists.
The Ukrainian government and the leaders of Ukrainian parties were
evacuated to Zhitomir, but the Jewish representatives did not follow them, they
remained under the Bolsheviks. And in addition, the Bolsheviks in Kiev were
supported by a sizable group of Jewish workers, who returned from England
after the [February, Kerensky] revolution and who now wholly siding with the
Soviet regime took up the posts of commissars and officials, and created
a special Jewish squad of Red Guards.1955
Yet soon after the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk [in which the
Soviets ceded Ukraine to the Central Powers] as the government of independent
Ukraine returned to Kiev under the aegis of Austrian and German bayonets in
the beginning of February of 1918, the haidamakas [spontaneous, popular
uprisings against Polish rule that took place in Ukraine in the 18th century] and
free Cossacks began snatching and shooting any former Jewish
commissars, they could find. Yet those were not actual Jewish pogroms, and
very soon Petliuras government was replaced by the Hetman government of
[Cossack leader] Skoropadsky for the next seven months. The command of the
units of the German Army that had occupied Kiev in the spring, treated the
needs of Jewish population with understanding. (And that population was not-
insubstantial: in 1919, 21% of Kievs inhabitants were Jewish.1956) A Jewish
Kadet [a member of Russian Constitutional Democrat Party] Sergei Gutnik
became the Minister of Trade and Industry in the Hetman government.1957 Under
the Hetmanate, Zionists acted without hindrance, and an independent Jewish
Provisional National Assembly and a Jewish National Secretariat were elected.
Yet Hetmanate fell and in December 1918 Kiev came under the control of
the Directorate of Ukraine led by Petliura and Vynnychenko. The Bund and
Poale-Zion [a movement of Marxist Jewish workers] did their best to help their
fellow socialists of the Directorate and Jewish Secretariat and also made

1954.. . // -2, . 33-34.

1955.. . // -2, . 35-37.
1956, . 4, . 256.
1957, . 1, . 407.
conciliatory moves. But Petliura saw it differently. His mouthpiece, the
newspaper Vidrodzhennya wrote: The birth of the Ukrainian State was not
expected by the Jews. The Jews did not anticipate it despite having an
extraordinary ability of getting the wind of any news. They emphasize their
knowledge of Russian language and ignore the fact of Ukrainian statehood
Jewry again has joined the side of our enemy. 1958 Jews were blamed for all the
Bolshevik victories in Ukraine. In Kiev, the Sich Riflemen plundered
apartments of wealthy people which in masse came over to the capital while the
military and atamans [originally Cossack commanders, then used by the
Ukrainian National Army] robbed smaller towns and shtetls. That year, a
regiment named after Petliura inaugurated mass pogroms by pillaging the town
of Sarny.
A Jewish deputy from the Lesser Rada attempted to ward off the growing
tendency toward pogroms among Petliuras troops: We need to warn
Ukrainians that you cannot found your state on anti-Semitism. Leaders of the
Directorate should remember that they are dealing with the worlds people,
which outlived many of its enemies and threatened to start a struggle against
such government.1959 Jewish parties quickly began to radicalize toward the Left,
thus inevitably turning their sympathies to Bolshevism.
Arnold Margolin, then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, said
that the situation in Ukraine was reminiscent of the worst times of Khmelnytsky
and Gonta [Cossack leader against Polish occupation of Ukraine]. 1960 D.
Pasmanik bitterly noted that Zionists and Jewish nationalists supported the
Directorates government for a while even when anti-Jewish pogroms raged
across Ukraine1961: How could Jewish socialists forget about the pogromist
attitudes of Petliura and other heroes of the Ukrainian Revolution.. How could
they forget about the Jewish blood shed by the descendants and disciples of
Khmelnytsky, Gonta and Zalizniak1962 Between December 1918 and August
1919, Petliuras troops carried out dozens of pogroms, killing, according to the
Commission of International Red Cross, around 50,000 Jews. The largest
pogrom happened on February 15, 1919, in Proskurov after a failed Bolshevik
coup attempt.1963 Jewish pogroms that went on non-stop from the very
moment of Ukrainian independence became particularly ferocious during the
period of the so-called Directorate and kept going until the Ukrainian armed
forces existed.1964
S. Maslov writes: True, in the Tsars times Jews were killed during
pogroms but they have never had been killed in such numbers as now and with

1958.. . 1918-1920 . // -
2*, . 59.
1959 , . 62.
1960 .
1961.. . ? // , . 211.
1962.. . // , . 66-67.
1963, . 6, . 570.
1964.. . // , . 65.
such callous indifference; sometimes during anti-Jewish pogroms by
rebellious peasant bands the entire shtetls were exterminated with
indiscriminate slaughter of children, women and elders.1965 After the
pogromists finished with their business, peasants from surrounding villages
usually arrived on wagons to join in looting commercial goods often stored in
large amounts in the towns because of the unsettled times. 1966 All over Ukraine
rebels attacked passenger trains and often commanded `communists and Jews to
get out of the coach and those who did were shot right on the spot; or,
checking papers of passengers, suspected Jews were ordered to pronounce
`kukuruza [corn]) and those who spoke with an accent were escorted out and
executed.1967
American scholar Muller thinks that the mass extermination of Jews in
Ukraine and Byelorussia during the Civil War was by no means a result of
articulated policy but rather a common peasant reaction.1968
Independent rebellious bands of Grigoriev, Zelyony, Sokolovsky, Struk,
Angel, Tyutyunik, Yatzeiko, Volynetz and Kozyr-Zirka were particularly
uncontrolled and because of this acted with extreme atrocity. However, Nestor
Makhno was different.
The raging Civil War provided fertile soil for the self-realization of
Makhnos criminal and rebellious personality. We are not going to recount his
villainous and clinically-mad deeds in this work, yet it should be noted that he
did not harbor anti-Jewish attitudes and that his anarchist-communist followers
loudly proclaimed their implacable hostility toward any form of anti-
Semitism. At different times, a certain Aaron Baron was his Chief of Staff, Lev
Zadov-Zenkovsky was his head of counter-intelligence, Volin-Eikhenbaum was
head of Makhnos agitprop, Arshinov was his close adviser, and one Kogan
headed Administration of Huliaipole [his capital]. There was even a 300-
strong separate Jewish company among his troops, led by Taranovsky, and
though at one point they betrayed Makhno, nevetheless Taranovsky was later
pardoned and even made the Makhnos Chief of Staff . The Jewish poor joined
Makhnos army in masses and allegedly Makhno trapped and executed ataman
Grigoriev for the latters anti-Semitism. In March 1919 Makhno executed
peasants from Uspenovka village for a pogrom in the Jewish agricultural colony
Gorkoye. However, despite his indisputable pro-Jewish stance (later in
emigration in Paris he was always in a Jewish milieu until his death), his
often uncontrollable troops carried out several Jewish pogroms, for instance, in
1918 near Ekaterinoslav1969 or in the summer of 1919 in Aleksandrovsk, though
Makhno and his officers rigorously protected Jewish populations and punished
pogromists with death.1970
1965.. , . 25, 26.
1966. . , . 40, 41.
1967.. , . 40.
1968. . // 22, 1990, 73, . 97.
1969. . // 22, 1983, 28, . 191-206.
1970, . 6, . 574.
 To examine the anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War, we
consult a large volume Jewish Pogroms: 1918-1921 compiled by Jewish Public
Committee for Aid to Victims of Pogroms in 1923 and published later in
1926.1971 (The year of publication explains why we find nothing about pogroms
by the Reds the book aims to examine the roles of Petliuras troops, the
Volunteer [White] Army, and Poles in the carnage of pogroms in the described
period.)
Regular troops participated in pogroms in larger cities and towns as they
marched, whereas independent bands acted in the hinterlands, thus effectively
denying the Jews safety anywhere.
Pogroms by Petliuras troops were particularly atrocious and systematic and
sometimes even without looting, such as, for example, pogroms in Proskurov,
Felsztyn and Zhytomir in February of 1919, Ovruch in March, Trostyanets,
Uman and Novomirgorod in May 1919. The worst pogroms by bands were in
Smila (March 1919), Elisavetgrad, Radomyshl, Vapniarka and Slovechno in
May 1919, in Dubovka (June 1919); by Denikins troops in Fastov
(September 1919) and Kiev (October 1919). In Byelorussia, there were pogroms
by Polish troops, for example, in Borisov and in the Bobruisk District, and by
Polish-supported troops of Bulak-Balachowicz in Mazyr, Turov, Petrakov,
Kapatkevitchy, Kovchitsy and Gorodyatitchy (in 1919, 1920, and 1921).
Ukrainian Jewry was horrified by the murderous wave of pogroms. During
brief periods of respite, the Jewish population fled en masse from already
pillaged or threatened places. There was indeed a mass exodus of Jews from
shtetls and small towns into larger cities nearby or toward the border with
Romania in a foolish hope to find aid there, or they simply aimlessly fled in
panic as they did from Tetiiv and Radomyshl. The most populous and
flourishing communities were turned into deserts. Jewish towns and shtetls
looked like gloomy cemeteries homes burnt and streets dead and desolated.
Several Jewish townships were completely wrecked and turned into ashes
Volodarka, Boguslav, Borshchagovka, Znamenka, Fastov, Tefiapol, Kutuzovka
and other places.1972

Let us now examine the White side. At first glance it may appear counter-
intuitive that Jews did not support the anti-Bolshevik movement. After all, the
White forces were substantially more pro-democratic then Bolsheviks (as it was
with [White generals] Denikin and Wrangel) and included not only monarchists
and all kinds of nationalists but also many liberal groups and all varieties of
anti-Bolshevik socialists. So why didnt we see Jews who shared the same
political views and sympathies there?

1971 , 1918-1921 / . .. . .: . -
, 1926.
1972 , 1918-1921, . 73-74.
 Fateful events irredeemably separated the Jews from the White movement.
The Jewish Encyclopedia informs us that initially many Jews of Rostov
supported the White movement. On December 13, 1917 a merchant prince, A.
Alperin, gave 800,000 rubles collected by the Jews of Rostov to A. Kaledin, the
leader of Don Cossacks, `to organize anti-Bolshevik Cossack troops. 1973 Yet
when General Alekseev [another White commander] was mustering his first
squadron in December 1917 in the same city of Rostov and needed funds and
asked (note asked and did not impress) the Rostov-Nakhichevan bourgeoisie
(mainly Jewish and Armenian) for money, they refused and he collected just a
dab of money and was forced to march out into the winter with unequipped
troops into his Ice March. And later all appeals by the Volunteer Army were
mostly ignored, yet whenever the Bolsheviks showed up and demanded money
and valuables, the population obediently handed over millions of rubles and
whole stores of goods.1974 When former Russian prime minister (of the
Provisional Government) prince G. E. Lvov, begging for aid abroad, visited
New York and Washington in 1918, he met a delegation of American Jews who
heard him out but offered no aid.1975
However, Pasmanik quotes a letter saying that by the end of 1918 more
than three and half millions rubles were being collected in the exclusive
Jewish circle with accompanying promises and reassurances of goodwill
toward Jews from the White authorities. Despite that, Jews were officially
prohibited to buy land in the Chernomorskaya Guberniya because of vicious
speculations by several Jews, though the order was revoked soon
afterwards.1976
Here is another example from my own sources: again in Rostov in February
1918 when the White movement was merely nascent and seemed almost
hopeless, an elderly Jewish engineer and manufacturer A. I. Arkhangorodsky,
who sincerely considered himself a Russian patriot, literally pushed his
reluctant student son into joining the White youth marching out into the night
[February 22], embarking on their Ice March (however, his sister didnt let him
go). The Jewish Encyclopedia also tells us that the Jews of Rostov were
joining Cossack guerilla squadrons and the students battalion of [White]
general L. Kornilovs army.1977
In Paris in 1975, Col. Levitin, the last surviving commander of the
Kornilov Regiment, told me that quite a few Jewish warrant officers, who were
commissioned in Kerenskys times, were loyal to Kornilov during the so-called
days of Kornilov in August 1917. He recalled one Katzman, a holder of the
Order of St. George from the First Kutepov Division.

1973, . 7, , 403.
1974.. . : ( ). ,
1923, . 169.
1975.. . . , 1932, .
274.
1976.. . , . 176-177.
1977, . 7, . 403.
 Yet we know that many Whites rejected sympathetic or neutral Jews
because of the prominent involvement of other Jews on the Red side, mistrust
and anger was bred among the White forces. A modern study suggests that
during the first year of its existence, the White movement was virtually free of
anti-Semitism at least in terms of major incidents and Jews were actually
serving in the Volunteer Army. However the situation dramatically changed
by 1919. First, after the Allied victory [in WWI], the widespread conviction
among the Whites that Germans helped Bolsheviks was displaced by a mythos
about Jews being the backbone of Bolshevism. On the other hand, after the
White troops occupied Ukraine, they came under influence of obsessive local
anti-Semitism that facilitated their espousal of anti-Jewish actions.1978
The White Army was hypnotized by Trotsky and Nakhamkis [an agent of
the Bolshevik Central Committee] and that caused the identification of
Bolshevism with Jewry and led to pogroms.1979 The Whites perceived Russia as
occupied by Jewish commissars and they marched to liberate her. And given
considerable unaccountability of separate units of that nascent and poorly
organized army strewn over the vast Russian territories and the general lack of
central authority in that war, it is not surprising that, unfortunately, some White
troops carried out pogroms. A. I. Denikin , like some other leaders of the
South Army (e.g., V. Z. Mai-Mayevsky), endorsed Kadet [the Constitutional
Democratic Party] and Socialist Revolutionary views and sought to stop the
outrages perpetrated by his troops. Yet those efforts were not effective.1980
Naturally, many Jews were driven by survival instinct and even if they
initially expected goodwill on the part of the Volunteer Army, after pogroms by
Denikins troops they lost any inclination to support the White movement.
Pasmanik provides a lively case. Aleksandrovsk was taken by the
Volunteers from the Bolsheviks. They were met by unanimous sincere joy of the
citizenry. Overnight half of the town was sacked and filled by the screaming
and moaning of distressed Jews. Wives were raped men beaten and
murdered, Jewish homes were totally ransacked. The pogrom continued for
three days and three nights. Post-executive Cossack cornet Sliva dismissed
complaints of the Public Administration saying `it is always like that: we take a
city and it belongs to the troops for three days.1981 It is impossible to explain
all this plunder and violence by soldiers of the Volunteer Army by actions of
Jewish commissars.
A top White general, A. von Lampe, claims that rumors about Jewish
pogroms by the Whites are tendentiously exaggerated, that these pillaging
requisitions were unavoidable actions of an army without quartermaster
services or regular supplies from the rear areas. He says that Jews were not
targeted deliberately but that all citizens suffered and that Jews suffered more
1978.. . : . .:
, 2001, . 56-57.
1979.. . ? // , . 216.
1980.. . , . 56.
1981.. . , . 185.
because they were numerous and rich. I am absolutely confident that in the
operational theaters of the White armies there were no Jewish pogroms, i.e., no
organized extermination and pillaging of Jews. There were robberies and even
murders which were purposefully overblown and misrepresented as anti-
Jewish pogroms by special press. Because of these accidents, the Second
Kuban Infantry Brigade and the Ossetian Cavalry Regiment were disbanded.
All the people, be they Christian or Jewish, suffered in disorderly areas. 1982
There were executions (on tip offs by locals) of those unfortunate commissars
and Chekists who did not manage to escape and there were quite a few Jews
among them.
Events in Fastov in September 1919 appear differently. According to the
Jewish Encyclopedia, Cossacks behaved outrageously they killed, raped and
flouted Jewish religious feelings (they had broken into a synagogue during Yom
Kippur, beat up the whole congregation, raped the women and tore apart the
Torah scrolls.) About one thousand were killed.1983 A methodical quarter-by-
quarter pillaging of Jews in Kiev after a brief return of the White troops in the
end of October 1919 was dubbed the quiet pogrom. Shulgin writes: The
commanders strictly prohibited `pogroms. Yet the Yids were really an
annoyance and, secondly, the `heroes were hungry. In general, the Volunteers
in large cities were starving. There were nights of plunder but without murder
and rape. It was the end of Denikins period and the beginning of the agony
of the Volunteer Army.1984
By the route of its offensive and, particularly, its retreat, during its last
brutal retreat in November-December of 1919, the White Army carried out a
large number of Jewish pogroms (acknowledged by Denikin), apparently not
only for plunder but also for revenge. However, Bikerman says that murders,
pillage and rape of women were not faithful companions of the White Army,
unlike what is claimed by our [Jewish] National Socialists who exaggerate the
horrible events to advance their own agenda.1985
Shulgin agrees: For a true White, a massacre of unarmed civilians, the
murder of women and children, and robbing someones property are absolutely
impossible things to do. Thus, the true Whites in this case are guilty of
negligence. They were not sufficiently rigorous in checking the scum adhering
to the White movement.1986
Pasmanik concurred that everybody understands that General Denikin did
not want pogroms but when I was in Novorossiysk and Ekaterinodar in April-
May 1919, i.e., before the march to the north, I could sense a thickened and

1982. . . // ,
1981, 3, . 38-39 ( : , 1929, 6-7).
1983, . 6, . 572.
1984.. , . 97-98.
1985.. . // , . 64.
1986.. . . 86.
pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitism everywhere.1987 Whatever it was
negligence or revenge it served well to ignite the White pogroms of 1919.
Still, by unanimous testimony of those unlucky enough to experience both
types of pogroms [those by Petliuras troops and those by White Army], it was
predominantly Petliuras troops who went for Jewish life and soul they did
the most killing.1988
It was not the Volunteer Army that initiated Jewish pogroms in the new
Russia. They began in the reborn Poland the day after she become a free and
independent state. While in Russia itself they were started by the Ukrainian
troops of the Democrat Petliura and the Socialist Vynnychenko. The
Ukrainians turned pogroms into an everyday event.1989.
The Volunteer Army did not start the pogroms but it carried on with them,
being fueled by a false conviction that all Jews were for Bolsheviks. The name
of L. Trotsky was particularly hated among the Whites and Petliuras soldiers
and almost every pogrom went under a slogan `This is what you get for Trotsky.
And even the Kadets who in the past always denounced any expression of
anti-Semitism, and all the more so the pogroms during their November 1919
conference in Kharkov demanded that Jews `declare relentless war against
those elements of Jewry who actively participate in the Bolshevist movement.
At the same time the Kadets emphasized that the White authorities do
everything possible to stop pogroms, namely that since the beginning of
October 1919 the leadership of the [Volunteer] Army began punishing
pogromists with many measures including execution and as a result pogroms
stopped for a while. Yet during the December 1919-March 1920 retreat of the
Volunteer Army from Ukraine the pogroms become particularly violent and the
Jews were accused of shooting the retreating Whites in the back. (Importantly,
there were no pogroms in Siberia by A. Kolchaks troops, as Kolchak did not
tolerate pogroms.1990)
D.O. Linsky, himself a former White Guard, emphatically writes: Jewry
was possibly given a unique chance to fight so hard for the Russian land, that
the slanderous claim, that for Jews Russia is just geography and not Fatherland,
would disappear once and for all. Actually, there was and is no alternative: the
victory of anti-Bolshevik forces will lead from suffering to revival of the whole
country and of the Jewish people in particular. Jewry should devote itself to
the Russian Cause entirely, to sacrifice their lives and wealth. Through the
dark stains on the White chasubles one should perceive the pure soul of the
White Movement. In an army where many Jewish youths were enlisted, in an
army relying on extensive material support from Jewish population, anti-
Semitism would suffocate and any pogromist movement would be countered
and checked by internal forces. Jewry should have supported the Russian Army

1987.. . , . 186-187.
1988.. . // , . 65-66.
1989.. . , . 173-174.
1990, . 6, . 572-574.
which went on in an immortal struggle for the Russian land. Jewry was
pushed from the Russian Cause, yet Jewry had to push away the pushers. He
writes all this after having painful personal experience of participation in the
White movement. Despite all those dark and serious problems that surfaced in
the White movement, we delightfully and with great reverence bow our
uncovered heads before this one and only commendable fact of the struggle
against the ignominy of Russian history, the so-called Russian Revolution. It
was a great movement for the unfading values of [upholding] the human
spirit.1991
Yet the White Army did not support even those Jews who volunteered for
service in it. What a humiliation people like doctor Pasmanik had to go through
(many Jews were outraged after finding him among the pogromists)! The
Volunteer Army persistently refused to accept Jewish petty officers and cadets,
even those who in October 1917 bravely fought against Bolsheviks. It was a
huge moral blow to Russian Jewry. I will never forget, he writes, how
eleven Jewish petty officers came to me in Simferopol complaining that they
were expelled from fighting units and posted as cooks in the rear.1992
Shulgin writes: If only as many Jews participated in the White Movement
as did in the `revolutionary democracy or in `constitutional democracy before
that. Yet only a tiny part of Jewry joined the White Guards only very few
individuals, whose dedication could not be overvalued as the anti-Semitism
[among the Whites] was already clearly obvious by that time. Meanwhile, there
were many Jews among the Reds, there, most importantly, they often
occupied the `top command positions. Arent we really aware of the bitter
tragedy of those few Jews who joined the Volunteer Army The lives of those
Jewish Volunteers were as endangered by the enemys bullets as they were by
the `heroes of the rear who tried to solve the Jewish question in their own
manner.1993
Yet it was not all about the heroes of the rear. And anti-Semitic feelings
had burst into flames among the young White officers from the intellectual
families despite all their education, tradition, and upbringing.
And this all the more doomed the White Army to isolation and perdition.
Linsky tells us that on the territories controlled by the Volunteer Army, the
Jews were not employable in the government services or in the OsvAg
(Information-Propaganda Agency, an intelligence and counter-intelligence
agency, established in the White Army by General A.M. Dragomirov). Yet he
refutes the claim that publications of OsvAg contained anti-Semitic propaganda
and that pogromists were not punished. No, the command did not want Jewish
pogroms, yet it could not act against the pogromist attitudes of their troops
it psychologically couldnt use severe measures. The army was not as it
used to be, and requirements of the regular wartime or peacetime military

1991.. . // , . 149-151.
1992.. . , . 183.
1993.. , . 55, 81, 82.
charters could not be fully applied to it, as the minds of all soldiers were
already battle-scarred by the Civil War.1994 Although they didnt want pogroms,
Denikins government didnt dare to denounce anti-Semitic propaganda loudly,
despite the fact that the pogroms inflicted great harm on Denikins army.
Pasmanik concludes: the Volunteer Army generally assumed a hostile attitude
toward the entire Russian Jewry.1995 But I. Levin disagrees, saying that the
views of only one part of the movement, those of the active pogromists, are now
attributed to the whole movement, while in reality the White Movement was
quite complex, it was composed of different factions with often opposite
views.1996 Yet to bet on Bolsheviks, to walk in their shadows because of fear of
pogroms, is obvious and evident madness. A Jew says: either the
Bolsheviks or the pogroms, whereas he should have been saying: the longer the
Bolsheviks hold power, the closer we are to certain death.1997 Yet the Judeo-
Communists were, in the parlance of the Whites, agitators as well.
All this was resolutely stopped by Wrangel in Crimea, where there was
nothing like what was described above. (Wrangel even personally ordered Rev.
Vladimir Vostokov to stop his public anti-Jewish sermons.)
In July 1920, Shulim Bezpalov, the aforementioned Jewish millionaire,
wrote from Paris to Wrangel in the Crimea: We must save our Motherland. She
will be saved by the children of the soil and industrialists. We must give away
75% of our revenue until the value of ruble has recovered and normal life
rebuilt.1998
Yet it was already too late.
Still, a part of the Jewish population of the Crimea chose to evacuate with
Wrangels army.1999
True, the White Movement was in desperate need of the support by the
Western public opinion, which in turn largely depended on the fate of Russian
Jewry. It needed that support, yet, as we saw, it had fatally and unavoidably
developed a hostility toward the Jews and later it was not able to prevent
pogroms. As Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill was the major
advocate of the Allied intervention in Russia and military aid to the White
armies. Because of the pogroms, Churchill appealed directly to Denikin: my
goal of securing the support in the Parliament for the Russian national
movement will be incomparably more difficult, if the pogroms are not stopped.
Churchill also feared the reaction of powerful Jewish circles among the British
elite.2000 Jewish circles in the USA held similar opinions [on the situation in
Russia].

1994.. . // , . 157, 160-161.

1995.. . , . 181, 187.
1996.. . // , . 136.
1997.. . // , . 81,82.
1998.. . , . 181.
1999, . 4, . 598.
2000Michael J. Cohen. Churchill and the Jews. London; Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass, 1985, p. 56,
57.
 However, the pogroms were not stopped, which largely explains the
extremely weak and reluctant assistance given by the Western powers to the
White armies. And calculations by Wall Street naturally led it to support
Bolsheviks as the more likely future rulers over Russias riches. Moreover, the
climate in the US and Europe was permeated by sympathy toward those who
claimed to be builders of a New World, with their grandiose plans and great
social objective.
And yet, the behavior of the former Entente of Western nations during the
entire Civil War is striking by its greed and blind indifference toward the White
Movement the successor of their wartime ally, Imperial Russia. They even
demanded that the Whites join the Bolshevik delegation at the Versailles Peace
Conference; then there was that delirious idea of peace negotiations with the
Bolsheviks on the Princes Islands. The Entente, which did not recognize any of
the White governments officially, was hastily recognizing all those new national
states emerging on the periphery of Russia thus unambiguously betraying the
desire for its dismemberment. The British hurried to occupy the oil-rich region
of Baku; the Japanese claimed parts of the Far East and the Kamchatka
Peninsula. The American troops in Siberia were more of hindrance than a help
and actually facilitated the capture of Primorye by the Bolsheviks. The Allies
even extorted payments for any aid they provided in gold from Kolchak; in
the South of Russia, in the form of Black Sea vessels, concessions and future
obligations. (There were truly shameful episodes: when the British were leaving
the Archangel region in the Russian north, they took with them some of the
Tsars military equipment and ammunition. They gave some of what they
couldnt take to the Reds and sunk the rest in the sea to prevent it from
getting into the hands of the Whites!) In the spring of 1920, the Entente put
forward an ultimatum to the White Generals Denikin and Wrangel demanding
an end to their struggle against the Bolsheviks. (In the summer of 1920 France
provided some material aid to Wrangel so that he could help Poland. Yet only
six months later they were parsimoniously deducting Wrangels military
equipment as payment for feeding of those Russian soldiers who retreated to
Gallipoli.)
We can judge about the actions of the few occupational forces actually sent
by the Entente from a testimonial by Prince Grigory Trubetskoy, a serious
diplomat, who observed the French Army during its occupation of Odessa in
1919: French policies in the South of Russia in general and their treatment of
issues of Russian statehood in particular were strikingly confused, revealing
their gross misunderstanding of the situation.2001

2001. . . .
. , 1919 // . .
.. . , 1981, . 202.
The black streak of Jewish pogroms in Ukraine ran through the whole of 1919
and the beginning of 1920. By their scope, scale and atrocity, these pogroms
immeasurably exceeded all the previous historical instances discussed in this
book the pogroms of 1881-1882, 1903, and 1905. Yu. Larin, a high-placed
Soviet functionary, wrote in the 1920s that during the Civil War Ukraine saw a
very large number of massive Jewish pogroms far exceeding anything from the
past with respect to the number of victims and number of perpetrators.
Vynnychenko allegedly said that the pogroms would stop only when the Jews
would stop being communists.2002
There is no precise estimate of the number of victims of those pogroms. Of
course, no reliable count could be performed in that situation, neither during the
events, nor immediately afterwards. In the book, Jewish Pogroms, we read:
The number of murdered in Ukraine and Byelorussia between 1917 and 1921
is approximately 180,000-200,000. The number of orphans alone, 300,000,
bespeaks of the enormous scale of the catastrophe. 2003 The first Soviet
Encyclopedia proposes the same number.2004 The present-day Jewish
Encyclopedia tells us that by different estimates, from 70,000 to 180,000-
200,000 Jews were killed.2005
Compiling data from different Jewish sources, a modern historian comes up
with 900 mass pogroms, of which: 40% by Petliuras Ukrainian Directorate
troops ; 25% by the squads of the various Ukrainian atamans; 17% by
Denikins White Army troops; and 8.5% by the First Cavalry Army of
Budyonny and other Red Army troops.2006
Yet how many butchered lives are behind these figures!
Already during the Civil War, national and socialist Jewish parties began
merging with the Reds. The Fareynikte [the United Jewish Socialist Workers
Party] turned into the ComFareynikte [Communist Jewish Socialist Workers
Party] and adopted the communist program and together with the communist
wing of the Bund formed the [All-Russian] ComBund in June 1920; in
Ukraine, associates and members of the Fareynikte together with the Ukrainian
ComBund formed the ComFarband (the Jewish Communist Union) which
later joined the All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks.2007 In 1919 in Kiev,
the official Soviet press provided texts in three languages Russian, Ukrainian
and Yiddish.
The Bolsheviks used these pogroms [in Ukraine] to their enormous
advantage, they extremely skillfully exploited the pogroms in order to influence

2002. . , . 38.
2003 , 1918-1921, . 74.
2004 . 1- . ., 1932. . 24, . 148.
2005, . 6, . 569.
2006.. . , . 56.
2007.. . , // -2, . 321; , . 6, .
85; . 1, . 560.
public opinion in Russia and abroad in many Jewish and non-Jewish circles
in Europe and America.2008
Yet the Reds had the finger in the pie as well and they were actually
first ones. In the spring of 1918, units of the Red Army, retreating from
Ukraine, perpetrated pogroms using the slogan `Strike the Yids and the
bourgeoisie ; the most atrocious pogroms were carried out by the First
Cavalry Army during its retreat from Poland in the end of August 1920. 2009 Yet
historical awareness of the pogroms carried out by the Red Army during the
Civil War has been rather glossed over. Only a few condemning voices have
spoken on the topic. Pasmanik wrote: During the first winter of Bolshevik rule,
the Red troops fighting under the red banner carried out several bloody
pogroms, most notable of which were pogroms in Glukhov and Novgorod-
Siverskiy. By number of victims, deliberate brutality, torture and abuse, those
two had eclipsed even the Kalush massacre. Retreating before the advancing
Germans, the Red troops were destroying Jewish settlements on their route.2010
S. Maslov is also quite clear: The march of the Budyonnys Cavalry Army
during its relocation from the Polish to the Crimean Front was marked by
thousands of murdered Jews, thousands of raped women and dozens of utterly
razed and looted Jewish settlements. In Zhytomyr, each new authority
inaugurated its rule with a pogrom, and often repeatedly after each time the city
changed hands again. The feature of all those pogroms by Petliuras troops,
the Poles, or the Soviets was the large number of killed.2011 The Bogunskiy
and Taraschanskiy regiments stood out in particular (though those two having
came over to Budyonny from the Directorate); allegedly, those regiments were
disarmed because of the pogroms and the instigators were hanged.
The above-cited socialist S. Schwartz concludes from his historical
standpoint (1952): During the revolutionary period, particularly during the
Civil War, anti-Semitism has grown extraordinarily and, especially in the
South, spread extensively in the broad masses of the urban and rural
population.2012
Alas, the resistance of the Russian population to the Bolsheviks (without
which we wouldnt have a right to call ourselves a people) had faltered and took
wrong turns in many ways, including on the Jewish issue. Meanwhile the
Bolshevik regime was touting the Jews and they were joining it, and the Civil
War was more and more broadening that chasm between Reds and Whites.
If the revolution in general has cleared Jewry of suspicion in counter-
revolutionary attitude, the counter-revolution has suspected all Jewry of being
pro-revolutionary. And thus, the Civil War became an unbearable torment for
Jewry, further consolidating them on the wrong revolutionary positions, and so
2008.. . // , . 134.
2009, . 6, 570, 574.
2010.. . // , . 63.
2011.. , . 26.
2012.. . . -: - . , 1952,
. 14.
they failed to recognize the genuine redemptive essence of the White
armies.2013
Lets not overlook the general situation during the Civil War. It was
literally a chaos which released unbridled anarchy across Russia. Anybody
who wanted and was able to rob and kill was robbing and killing whoever he
wanted. Officers of the Russian Army were massacred in the hundreds and
thousands by bands of mutinous rabble. Entire families of landowners were
murdered , estates were burned; valuable pieces of art were pilfered and
destroyed in some places in manors all living things including livestock were
exterminated. Mob rule spread terror on the streets of cities. Owners of
plants and factories were driven out of their enterprises and dwellings. Tens
of thousands people all over Russia were shot for the glory of the proletarian
revolution ; others rotted in stinking and vermin-infested prisons as
hostages. It was not a crime or personal actions that put a man under the axe
but his affiliation with a certain social stratum or class. It would be an absolute
miracle if, under conditions when whole human groups were designated for
extermination, the group named `Jews remained exempt. The curse of the
time was that it was possible to declare an entire class or a tribe `evil. So,
condemning an entire social class to destruction is called revolution, yet to
kill and rob Jews is called a pogrom? The Jewish pogrom in the South of
Russia was a component of the All-Russian pogrom.2014
Such was the woeful acquisition of all the peoples of Russia, including the
Jews, after the successful attainment of equal rights, after the splendid
Revolution of March, 1917, that both the general sympathy of Russian Jews
toward the Bolsheviks and the developed attitude of the White forces toward
Jews eclipsed and erased the most important benefit of a possible White victory
the sane evolution of the Russian state.

2013.. . // , . 147, 148, 149.

2014.. . // , . 58-60.
 Chapter 17. Emigration between the two World Wars

As a result of the October coup and the subsequent Civil War, hundreds of
thousands Russian citizens emigrated abroad, some retreating in battles, others
simply fleeing. Among those emigrants were the entire surviving combat
personnel of the White Army, and many Cossacks. They were joined by the old
nobility, who were so strikingly passive during the fateful revolutionary years,
although their wealth was precisely in land or estates. Many former landowners,
who failed to take their valuables with them, upon arrival to Europe had to
become taxi drivers or waiters. There were merchants, industrialists, financiers,
quite a few of whom had money safely deposited abroad, and ordinary citizens
too, of whom not all were well-educated, but who could not bear to stay under
Bolshevism.
Many emigrants were Russian Jews. Of more than 2 million emigrants
from the Soviet republics in 1918-1922 more than 200,000 were Jews. Most of
them crossed the Polish and Romanian borders, and later emigrated to the USA,
Canada, and the countries of South America and Western Europe. Many
repatriated to Palestine.2015 The newly formed independent Poland played an
important role. It had a large Jewish population of its own before the revolution,
and now a part of those who left Poland during the war were returning there too.
Poles estimate that after the Bolshevik revolution 200-300 thousand Jews
arrived in Poland from Russia.2016 (This figure could be explained not only by
increased emigration, but also by the re-arrangement of the Russian-Polish
border). However the majority of the Jews who left Russia in the first years
after the revolution settled in Western Europe. For example, around 100,000
Russian Jews had gathered in Germany by the end of World War I.2017
While Paris was, from the beginning, the political centre and unofficial
capital of Russia-in-Exile., The second, so to say cultural capital of Russian
emigration in Europe from the end of 1920 until the beginning of 1924, was
Berlin (there was also an intense cultural life in the 1920s in the Russian
2015Kratkaja Evreiskaja Entsiklopedija [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforthSJE)].
Jerusalem, 1996. v. 8, p. 294.
2016James Parkes. The Jew and his Neighbour: a Study of the Causes of Antisemitism. Paris:
YMCA-Press, 1932, p. 44.
2017D. Kharuv. Evreiskaja emigratsija iz Rossiiskoj imperii i Sovetskogo Sojuza: statisticheskij
aspect [Jewish Emigration from the Russian Empire and Soviet Union: statistical aspect] //
Russkoe evreistvo v zarubezhje: Statji, publikatsii, memuary i esse [Russian Jewry in Exile:
Articles, Publications, Memoires, and Essays]. Jerusalem, 1998, v. 1 (6), p. 352.
quarters of Prague, which became Russia-in-Exiles main university
city).2018 It was easier to settle in Berlin because of inflation. On the streets
of Berlin you could see former major industrialists and merchants, bankers
and manufacturers,2019 and many migrs had capital there. Compared to other
emigrants from Russia, Jewish emigrants had fewer problems with integration
into the Diaspora life, and felt more confident there. Jewish emigrants were
more active than Russians and generally avoided humiliating jobs. Mihkail
Levitov, the commander of the Kornilov Regiment who had experienced all
sorts of unskilled labour after emigration, told me: Who paid us decently in
Paris? Jews. Russian multi-millionaires treated their own miserably.
Both in Berlin and in Paris the Jewish intelligentsia was prominent
lawyers, book publishers, social and political activists, scholars, writers and
journalists2020; many of them were deeply assimilated, while Russian emigrants
from the capitals [Moscow and St. Petersburg] mostly had liberal opinions
which facilitated mutual amity between the two groups (unlike the feeling
between Jews and the Russian monarchist emigrants). The influence of Russian
Jews in the entire cultural atmosphere of Russia-in-Exile between the two world
wars was more than palpable. (Here it is proper to mention a very interesting
series of collections, Jews in the Culture of Russia-in-Exile, published in Israel
in 1990s and still continuing.2021) Some Jewish families with a comfortable
income opened Russian artistic salons, clearly demonstrating Jewish attachment
to and immersion in Russian culture. There was a famously generous house of
the Tsetlins in Paris. Many others, I. V. Gessens (in Berlin), I. I. Fondaminsky-
Bunakov (tireless in his endless, selfless cares for Russian culture abroad 2022),
Sofia Pregel, Sonya Delone, Alexander and Salomeia Galpern, were constantly
engaged in the burdensome business of providing assistance for impoverished
writers and artists. They helped many, and not just the famous, such as Bunin,
Remizov, Balmont, Teffi, but also unknown young poets and painters.
(However, this help did not extend to White and monarchist emigrants, with
whom there was mutual antagonism). Overall, among all the emigrants, Russian
Jews proved themselves the most active in all forms of cultural and social
enterprise. This was so striking that it was reflected in Mihail Osorgins article,

2018Gleb Struve. Russkaja literatura v izgnanii [Russian Literature in Exile]. The 2nd edition.
Paris, YMCA-Press, 1984, p. 24.
2019A. Sedykh. Russkie evrei v emigrantskoj literature [Russian Jews in the migr
Literature] // Kniga o russkom evrejstve: 1917-1967 [The Book of Russian Jewry: 1917-
1967 (henceforth BRJ-2)]. New York: Association of Russian Jews, 1968, p. 426-427.
2020Ibid., p. 426.
2021Evrei v culture Russkogo Zarubezhja: Statji, publikatsii, memuary i esse [Jews in the
Culture of Russia-in-Exile: Articles, Publications, Memoires, and Essays]. In 5 volumes,
Jerusalem, 1992-1996, complied by M. Parkhomovskij. See also Russkoe evreistvo v
zarubezhje: Statji, publikatsii, memuary i esse [Russian Jewry in Exile: Articles,
Publications, Memoires, and Essays]. Jerusalem, 1998, compiled and edited by M.
Parkhomovskij.
2022Roman Gul. Ya unes Rossiju [I Have Carried Russia with Me]. New York, Most, 1984, v. 2:
Russia in France, p. 99.
Russian Loneliness, printed in the Russian Zionist magazine Rassvet [Dawn],
re-established abroad by V. Jabotinsky.
Osorgin wrote: In Russia, there was not this Russian loneliness neither in
the social nor the revolutionary movement (I mean the depths and not just the
surface); the most prominent figures who gave specific flavour to the whole
movement were Slavic Russians. But after emigration where there is a
refined spirituality, where there is deep interest in thought and art, where the
calibre of man is higher, there a Russian feels national loneliness; on the other
hand, where there are more of his kin, he feels cultural solitude. I call this
tragedy the Russian loneliness. I am not at all an anti-Semite, but I am primarily
a Russian Slav My people, Russians, are much closer to me in spirit, in
language and speech, in their specific national strengths and weaknesses. For
me, it is precious to have them as my fellow thinkers and peers, or perhaps it is
just more comfortable and pleasant. Although I can respect the Jew, the Tatar,
the Pole in the multi-ethnic and not at all Russian Russia, and recognise each
as possessing the same right to Russia, our collective mother, as I have; yet I
myself belong to the Russian group, to that spiritually influential group which
has shaped the Russian culture. But now Russians abroad have faded and
given up and surrendered the positions of power to another tribes energy. Jews
adapt easier and good for them! I am not envious, I am happy for them. I am
equally willing to step aside and grant them the honour of leadership in various
social movements and enterprises abroad. But there is one area where this
Jewish empowerment strikes me at the heart charity. I do not know who has
more money and diamonds, rich Jews or rich Russians. But I know for certain
that all large charitable organizations in Paris and Berlin can help poor Russian
emigrants only because they collect the money needed from generous Jewry. My
experience of organizing soires, concerts, meetings with authors has proven
that appealing to rich Russians is a pointless and humiliating waste of time.
Just to soften the tone of such an anti-Semitic article, I will add that, in my
opinion, the nationally-sensitive Jew can often mistake national sensitivity of a
Slav for a spectre of anti-Semitism.2023
Osorgins article was accompanied by the editorial (most likely written by
the editor-in-chief Jabotinsky based on the ideas expressed and with a similar
style) to the effect that M.A. Osorgin has no reason to fear that the reader of
Rassvet would find anti-Semitic tendencies [in his article]. There was once a
generation that shuddered at the word Jew on the lips of a non-Jew. One of the
foreign leaders of that generation said: The best favour the major press can
give us is to not mention us. He was listened to, and for a long time in
progressive circles in Russia and Europe the word Jew was regarded as an
unprintable obscenity. Thank God, that time is over. We can assure Osorgin of
our understanding and sympathy. However, we disagree with him on one

2023M. Osorgin. Russkoe odinochestvo [Russian Loneliness]. Publication of A. Razgon. // Jews

in the Culture of Russia-in-Exile: Articles, Publications, Memoires, and Essays. V. 1, p. 15-
17. (Reprinted from Rassvet. Paris, January 15, 1925 (7)).
point. He gives too much importance to the role of Jews in charity among
refugees. First, this prominent role is natural. Unlike Russians, we were learning
the art of living in Diaspora for a long time. But there is a deeper
explanation. We have received much that is precious from the Russian
culture; we will use it even in our future independent national art. We,
Russian Jews, are in debt to Russian culture; we have not come close to
repaying that debt. Those of us that do what they can to help it survive during
these hard times are doing what is right and, we hope, will continue doing
so.2024
However let us return to the years immediately after the revolution.
Political passions were still running high among Russian emigrants, and there
was a desire to comprehend what had happened in Russia. Newspapers,
magazines, book publishers sprung up.2025 Some rich men, usually Jews,
financed this new liberal and more left-of-center Russian emigrant press. There
were many Jews among journalists, newspaper and magazine editors, book
publishers. A detailed record of their contribution can be found in The Book of
Russian Jewry (now also in Jews in the Culture of Russia-in-Exile).
Of significant historical value among these are the twenty two volumes of I.
V. Gessens Archive of the Russian Revolution. Gessen himself, along with A. I.
Kaminkov and V. D. Nabokov (and G. A. Landau after the latters death),
published a prominent Berlin newspaper Rul [Steering Wheel], a kind of
emigrant version of Rech [Speech], but unlike Milyukovs brainchild, Josef
Gessens position was consistently patriotic. Rul often published articles by G.
A. Landau and I. O. Levin, whom I have amply cited, and also articles by the
famous literary critic U. I. Aikhenvald. The political spectrum of Berlin papers
ranged from Rul on the right to the socialists on the left. A. F. Kerensky
published Dni [Days], which provided a platform for such personalities as A.
M. Kulisher-Yunius (author of a number of sociological works and a Zionist
from Jabotinskys circle), S. M. Soloveichik, the famous former Socialist
Revolutionary O. C. Minor (he also wrote for the Prague Volya Rossii [Russias
Will]), and the former secretary of the Constituent Assembly M. V. Vishnyak. In
1921 U. O. Martov and R. A. Abramovich founded the Socialist Gerald in
Berlin (it later moved to Paris and then New York). F. I. Dan, D. U. Dalin, P. A.
Garvi, and G. Y. Aranson worked on it among others.
V. E. Jabotinsky, whose arrival in Berlin (after three years in Jerusalem)
coincided with the first wave of emigration, re-established Rassvet, first in
Berlin and then in Paris, and also published his own novels. In addition many
Russian Jewish journalists lived in Berlin in 1920-1923, working in the local
and international emigrant press. There we could find I. M. Trotsky from the
defunct Russkoe Slovo [Russian Word], N. M. Volkovyssky, P. I. Zvezdich (who

2024M. Osorgin. Russkoe odinochestvo [Russian Solitude]. // Jews in the Culture of Russia-in-
Exile. V. 1, p. 18-19.
2025A. Sedykh. Russkie evrei v emigrantskoj literature [Russian Jews in the migr
Literature] // BRJ-2, p. 427.
died at the hands of Nazis during the World War II), the Menshevik S. O.
Portugeis from the St. Petersburg Den [Day] (he wrote under the pseudonym S.
Ivanovich), the playwriter Osip Dymov-Perelman, and the novelist V. Y.
Iretsky.2026
Berlin also became the capital of Russian book publishing: In 1922 all
these Russian publishers released more Russian books and publications than
there were German books published in the whole of Germany. Most of these
publishers and booksellers were Jewish.2027 Most notable were the publishing
houses of I. P. Ladyzhnikov, owned since the war by B. N. Rubinstein (classical,
modern and popular scientific literature), of Z. I. Grzhebin (which had links to
the Soviets, and so sold some of his works in the USSR), the publishing house,
Word, established as early as 1919 and run by I. V. Gessen and A. I. Kaminka
(collections of Russian classics, emigrant writers and philosophers, valuable
historical and biographical works), and the artistically superb issues of Zhar-
Ptitsa run by A. E. Kogan. Also there was Edges of A. Tsatskis, Petropolis of Y.
N. Blokh, Obelisk of A. S. Kagan, Helicon of A.G. Vishnyak, and Scythians of I.
Shteinberg. S. Dubnovs World History of the Jewish People was also published
in Berlin in ten German volumes, and during the 1930s in Russian in Riga.
Riga and other cities in the once again independent Baltic countries (with
their substantial Jewish populations) became major destinations of Jewish
emigration. Moreover, the only common language that Latvians, Estonians and
Lithuanians shared was Russian, and so the Riga newspaper Segodnya [Today]
(publishers Ya. I. Brams and B. Yu. Polyak) became highly influential. A
large number of Russian-Jewish journalists worked there: the editor M. I.
Ganfman, and after his death M. S. Milrud; Segodnya Vecherom [Today
Evening] was edited by B. I. Khariton (the latter two were arrested by the
NKVD in 1940 and died in Soviet camps). V. Ziv, an economist, and M. K.
Aizenshtadt (under the pen names of first Zheleznov, then Argus) wrote for the
newspaper. Gershon Svet wrote from Berlin. Andrei Sedykh (Y. M. Tsvibak)
was its Paris correspondent, Volkovyssky reported from Berlin, and L. M.
Nemanov from Geneva.2028
From the late 1920s, Berlin started to lose its position as the centre of
emigrant culture because of the economic instability and the rise of Nazism. Rul
had to close in 1931. Emigrants had dispersed with the main wave going to
France, especially to Paris which was already a major centre of emigration.
In Paris the main emigrant newspaper was Poslednie Novosti [Breaking
News], founded at the beginning of 1920 by the St. Petersburg barrister M. L.
Goldstein. It was financed by M. S. Zalshupin, and in a year the newspaper
was bought by P. N. Milyukov. While it was in a precarious position, the
paper was significantly financially supported by M. M. Vinaver. Milyukovs
2026Ibid., 429, 430.
2027I. Levitan. Russkie izdatelstva v 20-kh gg. v Berline [Russian Publishing Houses in Berlin
in 1920s]. // BRJ-2, p. 448.
2028A. Sedykh. Russkie evrei v emigrantskoj literature [Russian Jews in the migr
Literature] // BRJ-2, p. 431, 432.
right hand was A. A. Polyakov. Editorials and political articles were written by
Kulisher-Yunius (who was arrested in 1942 in France and died in a
concentration camp). The international news section was run by M. Yu.
Berkhin-Benedictov, an acquaintance of Jabotinsky. The staff included the
acerbic publicist S. L. Polyakov-Litovtsev (who had only learnt to speak and
write Russian at fifteen), B. S. Mirkin-Getsevich (who wrote as Boris Mirsky),
the noted Kadet [Constitutional Democrat] publicist Pyotr Ryss and others.
Poslednie Novosti published the satirical articles of I. V. Dioneo-Shklovsky and
the popular science of Yu. Delevsky (Ya. L. Yudelevsky). The best humorists
were V. Azov (V. A. Ashkenazi), Sasha Cherny (A. M. Gliksberg), the king of
humour Don-Aminado (Shpolyansky). Poslednie Novosti had the widest
circulation of all emigrant newspapers.2029 Shulgin called it the citadel of
political Jewishness and philo-Semitic Russians.2030 Sedykh regarded this
opinion as an obvious exaggeration. The political tension around the paper
also stemmed from the fact that immediately after the Civil War it was
dedicated to disclosure and sometimes outright condemnation of the
Volunteer Army. Sedykh noted that in Paris there was not only a political
divide, but also a national one; Milyukovs editorial team included many
Russian-Jewish journalists, while Jewish names virtually never appeared on
the pages of the right-wing Vozrozhdenie [Rebirth] (with the exception of I. M.
Bikerman).2031 (Vozrozhdenie was founded later than the other papers and ceased
operation in 1927, when its benefactor Gukasov fired the main editor P. B.
Struve.)
The leading literary-political magazine Sovremennye Zapiski
[Contemporary Notes], published in Paris from 1920 to 1940, was established
and run by Socialist Revolutionaries, N. D. Avksentiev, I. I. Fondaminsky-
Bunakov, V. V. Rudnev, M. V. Vishnyak and A. I. Gukovsky. Sedykh noted that
out of [its] five editors three were Jews. In 70 volumes of the Sovremennye
Zapiski we see fiction, articles on various topics and the memoirs of a large
number of Jewish authors. Illyustrirovannaya Rossia [Illustrated Russia] was
published by the St. Petersburg journalist M. P. Mironov, and later by B. A.
Gordon (earlier the owner of Priazovsky Krai).2032 Its weekly supplement gave
the readers 52 pieces of classic or contemporary emigrant literature each year.
(The literary emigrant world also included many prominent Russian Jews, such
as Mark Aldanov, Semyon Yushkevich, the already mentioned Jabotinsky and
Yuly Aikhenvald, M. O. Tsetlin (Amari). However, the topic of Russian
emigrant literature cannot be examined in any detail here due to its
immenseness.)

2029Ibid., p. 431, 432-434.

2030V. V. Shulgin. Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsya: ob antisemitizme v Rossii [What we
dont like about them: on Anti-Semitism in Russia (henceforth V. V. Shulgin]. Paris, 1929,
p. 210.
2031A. Sedykh. Russkie evrei v emigrantskoj literature [Russian Jews in the migr
Literature] // BRJ-2, p. 432, 434.
2032Ibid., p. 435-436.
 Here I would like to address the life of Ilya Fondaminsky (born in 1880).
Himself from a prosperous merchant family and married in his youth to the
granddaughter of the millionaire tea trader V. Y. Vysotsky, he nonetheless joined
the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and sacrificed a large part of his wealth and
his wifes inheritance to the revolution2033 by buying weaponry. He worked
towards the outbreak of the All-Russian political strike in 1905 and during the
uprising he served in the headquarters of the SRs. He emigrated from Russia to
Paris in 1906, where he became close to D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius and
developed an interest in Christianity. He returned to St. Petersburg in April
1917. In the summer of 1917 he was the commissar of the Black Sea Fleet, and
later a delegate in the Constituent Assembly, fleeing after it was disbanded.
From 1919 he lived in Paris, France, during the period under discussion. He
devoted much time and effort to Sovremennye Zapiski, including publication of
a series of articles titled The Ways of Russia. He played an active role in
emigrant cultural life and provided all possible support to Russian writers and
poets. For a while he even managed to maintain a Russian theatre in Paris. His
passion, many-sidedness, energy and selflessness were without parallel
among emigrants.2034 He estranged himself from the SRs and joined Christian
Democrats. Along with the like-minded G. P. Fedotov and F. A. Stepun he
began to publish the Christian Democratic Novy Grad [New City]. He grew
ever closer to Orthodoxy during these years.2035 In June 1940 he fled Paris
from the advancing German forces, but came back and was arrested in
July1941and sent to Compiegne camp near Paris; by some accounts, he
converted to Christianity there. In 1942 he was deported to Auschwitz and
killed.2036
Between 1920 and 1924, the most important forum for purely Jewish issues
was the Paris weekly, Jewish Tribune, published in both French and Russian
with the prominent participation of M. M. Vinaver and S. B. Pozner. It
published articles by many of the aforementioned journalists from other
newspapers.
Novoe Russkoe Slovo [New Russian Word] was founded in 1910 in the
United States and added its voice from across the ocean. Its publisher from
1920 was V. I. Shimkin and the main editor (from 1922) was M. E. Veinbaum.
Veinbaum remembered: The newspaper was often criticised, and not without
reason. But gradually it earned the readers confidence. 2037 (Its masthead now
proudly boasts: the oldest Russian newspaper in the world; it is even two

2033SJE, v.9, p. 253.

2034Roman Gul. Ya unes Rossiju [I Have Carried Russia with Me]. New York, Most, 1984, v. 2:
Russia in France, p. 100.
2035Gleb Struve. Russkaja literatura v izgnanii [Russian Literature in Exile]. The 2nd edition.
Paris, YMCA-Press, 1984, p. 230.
2036SJE, v.9, p. 255.
2037A. Sedykh. Russkie evrei v emigrantskoj literature [Russian Jews in the migr
Literature] // BRJ-2, p. 443.
years older than Pravda. All the others have died out at various times, for
various reasons.)
Right-wing or nationalist Russian newspapers appeared in Sofia, Prague,
and even Suvorins Novoe Vremya [New Times] continued in Belgrade as
Vechernee Vremya [Evening Times], but they all either collapsed or withered
away without leaving a lasting contribution. (The publisher of Rus in Sofia was
killed.) The Paris Vozrozhdenie of Yu. Semenov did not shirk from anti-Semitic
outbursts2038 (but not under Struves short reign).

Those who left soon after the Bolshevik victory could not even imagine the
scale of inferno that broke out in Russia. It was impossible to believe in
rumours. Testimonies from the White camp were mostly ignored. This changed
when several Russian democratic journalists (the Constitutional Democrat
(Kadet) A. V. Tyrkova-Williams, the socialist E. D. Kuskova (exiled from the
USSR in 1922), and the escaped SR S. S. Maslov began to inform the stunned
emigrant public about rapid growth of grass-root anti-Semitism in Soviet
Russia: Judeophobia is one of the most acrid features of modern Russia.
Perhaps even the most acrid. Judeophobia is everywhere: North, South, East,
and West. It is shared regardless of intellect, party membership, tribe, age.
Even some Jews share it.2039
These claims were at first met with suspicion by Jews who had emigrated
earlier whats the reason for this anti-Semitism? The Jewish Tribune initially
rejected these claims: generally, Russian Jewry suffered from Bolshevism
perhaps more than any other ethnic group in Russia; as to the familiar
identification of Jews and commissars we all know that it is the work of the
[anti-Semitic] Black Hundreds. The old view, that anti-Semitism resides not
in the people but in Tsarism, began to transform into another, that the Russian
people are themselves its carriers. Therefore, Bolsheviks should be credited for
the suppression of popular Black Hundred attitudes in Russia. (Others began
to excuse even their capitulation at Brest [at which Russia ceded large amounts
of territory to the Kaisers German military]. The Jewish Tribune in 1924 dusted
off even such argument: the Russian revolution of 1917, when it reached
Brest-Litovsk, prevented the much greater and more fateful betrayal planned by
Tsarist Russia.2040)
Yet the information was gradually confirmed; moreover, anti-Jewish
sentiments spread over a large segment of Russian emigration. The Union for
Russian Salvation (dedicated to crown prince Nikolai Nikolaevich) produced
2038Ibid., p. 432.
2039S. S. Moslov. Rossija posle chetyrekh let revolutsii [Russia After Four Years of
Revolution]. Paris: Russkaya Pechat [Russian Press], 1922, v. 2, p. 37.
2040B. Mirsky. Chernaja sotnya [The Black Hundred]. // Evreiskaja tribuna: Ezhenedelnik,
posvyashchenny interesam russkikh evreev [The Jewish Tribune: A Weekly Dedicated to the
Interests of Russian Jews]. Paris, February 1, 1924, p. 3.
leaflets for distribution in the USSR in a manner like this: To the Red Army.
The Jews have ruled Great Russia for seven years. To Russian workers.
You were assured that you would be the masters of the country; that it will be
the dictatorship of the proletariat. Where is it then? Who is in power in all the
cities of the republic? Of course, these leaflets did not reach the USSR, but
they scared and offended Jewish emigrants.
S. Litovtsev wrote: In the beginning of 1920s, anti-Semitism among
emigrants became almost an illness, a sort of delirium tremens.2041 But it was a
broader attitude as many in Europe during the first years after the Bolshevik
victory rejected and damned the Jews, so that the identification of Bolshevism
with Judaism became a widespread part of European thought. It is ridiculous to
assert that it is only anti-Semites preach this social-political heresy.2042 But
could it be that the conclusions of Dr. Pasmanik were somehow premature? Yet
this is what he wrote in 1922: In the whole civilised world, among all nations
and social classes and political parties, it is the established opinion now that
Jews played the crucial role in the appearance and in all the manifestations of
Bolshevism. Personal experience tells that this is the opinion not only of
downright anti-Semites, but also that representatives of the democratic
public reference these claims, i.e., to the role of Jews not only in Russian
Bolshevism, but also in Hungary, Germany and everywhere else it has appeared.
At the same time, the downright anti-Semites care little for truth. For them all
Bolsheviks are Jews, and all Jews are Bolsheviks.2043
Bikerman wrote a year later: Waves of Judeophobia now roll over nations
and peoples, with no end in sight; not just in Bavaria or Hungary not only
in the nations formed from the ruins of the once great Russia but also in
countries separated from Russia by continents and oceans and untouched by the
turmoil. Japanese academics came to Germany to get acquainted with anti-
Semitic literature: there is interest in us even on distant islands where almost no
Jews live. It is precisely Judeophobia the fear of the Jew-destroyer. Russias
miserable fate serves as the material evidence to frighten and enrage.2044
In the collective declaration To the Jews of the World! the authors warn:
Never have so many clouds gathered above the Jewish people.2045
Should we conclude that these authors exaggerated, that they were too
sensitive? That they imagined a non-existent threat? Yet doesnt the

2041S. Litovtsev. Disput ob antisemitizme [Debate on Anti-Semitism]. // Poslednie Novosti,

May 29, 1928, p. 2.
2042D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaja revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian
Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 9.
2043Ibid.
2044I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // Rossiya i evrei:
Otechestvennoe objedinenie russkikh evreev za granitsei [Russia and Jews: Expatriate
Society of Russian Jews in Exile (henceforthRJ)]. Paris, YMCA-Press, 1978, p. 11-12
[The 1st Edition: Berlin, Osnova, 1924].
2045To the Jews of the World! // RJ, p. 6.
abovementioned warning about anti-Semitic literature in Germany sound very
scary in retrospect, from our historical perspective?
The opinion that Jews created Bolshevism was already so widespread in
Europe (this was the average opinion of French and English philistines,
Pasmanik notes) that it was supported even by Plekhanovs son-in-law, George
Bato, who claims in his book2046 that Jews are inherently revolutionaries: as
Judaism preaches an ideal of social justice on earth it has to support
revolution. Pasmanik cites Bato: Over the centuries Jews have always
been against the established order. This does not mean that Jews carried out
all revolutions, or that they were always the sole or even main instigators; they
help the revolutions and participate in them; One can responsibly claim, as
many Russian patriots, often from very progressive circles, do, that Russia now
agonizes under the power of Jewish dictatorship and Jewish terror; Impartial
analysis of the worldwide situation shows the rebirth of anti-Semitism, not so
much against Jews as individuals, as against the manifestations of the Jewish
spirit.2047 The Englishman Hilaire Belloc2048 similarly wrote about the Jewish
character of Bolshevik revolution, or simply: the Jewish revolution in
Russia. Pasmanik adds that anyone who has lived in England recently knows
that Bellocs opinion is not marginal. The books of both authors (Bato and
Belloc) are enormously popular with the public; journalists all over the
world argue that all the destructive ideas of the past hundred years are spread by
Jews, through precisely Judaism.2049
We must defend ourselves, Pasmanik writes, because we cannot deny
obvious facts. We cannot just declare that the Jewish people are not to blame
for the acts of this or that individual Jew. Our goal is not only an argument
with anti-Semites, but also a struggle with Bolshevism not only to parry
blows, but to inflict them on those proclaiming the Kingdom of Ham. To
fight against Ham is the duty of Japheth and Shem, and of Helenes, and
Hebrews. Where should we look for the real roots of Bolshevism?
Bolshevism is primarily an anti-cultural force it is both a Russian and a
global problem, and not the machination of the notorious Elders of Zion.2050
The Jews acutely realized the need to defend themselves in part because
the post-war Europe and America were flooded with Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, suddenly and virtually instantly. These were five editions in England in
1920, several editions in both Germany and France; half a million copies in
America were printed by Henry Ford. The unheard-of success of the Protocols,
which were translated into several languages, showed how much the Bolshevik

2046Georges Batault. Leproblemejuif. Sedition, Paris, 1921.

2047D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaja revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian
Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 15-16, 95.
2048Hilaire Belloc. The Jews. London, 1922.
2049D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaja revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian
Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 16, 78.
2050Ibid., p. 11-13.
revolution was believed to be Jewish.2051 English researcher Norman Cohn
wrote: in the years immediately after the World War I, when the Protocols
entered mainstream and thundered across the world, many otherwise entirely
sensible people took them completely seriously. 2052 The London Times and
Morning Post of that time vouched for their authenticity, although by August
1921 the Times published a series of articles from its Istanbul correspondent,
Philipp Greaves, who sensationally demonstrated the extensive borrowing of
the text in the Protocols from Maurice Jolies anti-Napoleon III pamphlets (The
Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, 1864). At that time the
French police managed to confiscate every single copy of the infamous
pamphlet.
The Protocols came to the West from a Russia overtaken by the Civil War.
A journalistic fraud produced in the early 20th century (in 1900 or 1901),
the Protocols were first published in 1903 in St. Petersburg. The mastermind
behind them is thought to be P. I. Rachkovsky, the 1884-1902 head of the
Foreign Intelligence unit of the Police Department; their production is attributed
to Matvei Golovinsky, a secret agent from 1892 and son of V. A. Golovinsky,
who was a member of Petrashevsky Circle. [The latter was a Russian literary
discussion group of progressive-minded commoner-intellectuals in St.
Petersburg organized by Mikhail Petrashevsky, a follower of the French utopian
socialist Charles Fourier. Among the members were writers, teachers, students,
minor government officials, army officers. While differing in political views,
most of them were opponents of the Tsarist autocracy and the Russian serfdom.
Among those connected to the circle were writers Dostoyevsky]. (Still, new
theories about the origin of the Protocols appear all the time). Although the
Protocols were published and re-published in 1905, 1906, 1911, they had little
success in pre-revolutionary Russia: they did not find broad support in Russian
society. The Court did not give support to distribution either. 2053 After many
failed attempts, the Protocols were finally presented to Nicholas II in 1906 and
he was very impressed. His notes on the margins of the book included: What a
foresight!, What precise execution!, It is definitely them who orchestrated
the [revolutionary] events of 1905!, There can be no doubt about their
authenticity. But when the right-wing activists suggested using the Protocols
for the defence of the monarchy, Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin ordered a secret
investigation into their origins. It showed they were a definite fabrication. The
monarch was shocked by Stolypins report, but wrote firmly: remove the
Protocols from circulation. You cannot defend a noble cause with dirty
means.2054 And since then Russias rulers dismissal of the Protocols of the

2051M. Daursky. Ideologiya national-bolshevizma [Ideology of National Bolshevism]. Paris.

YMCA-Press, 1980, p. 195.
2052Norman Cohn. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Russian translation. Moscow, Progress, 1990, p. 24
2053SJE, v.6, p. 846.
2054This information was obtained by V. L. Burtsev in 1934 from General K. I. Globachev, the
former head of St. Petersburg Guard Department (from February 1915 until March 1917).
Elders of Zion came into force: no reference to the Protocols was allowed
even during the Beilis Trial.2055
However 1918 changed everything for the Protocols.2056 After the
Bolsheviks seized power, after the murder of the royal family and the beginning
of the Civil War, the popularity of the Protocols surged. They were printed and
re-printed by the OsvAg [White Army counter-intelligence agency in the South
of Russia] in Novocherkassk, Kharkov, Rostov-on-Don, Omsk, Khabarovsk,
Vladivostok, and were widely circulated among both the Volunteer Army and
the population (and later Russian emigrants, especially in Sofia and Belgrade).
After the Bolshevik victory the selling of Protocols was banned in Russia
and become a criminal offence, but in Europe the Protocols brought in by the
White emigration played an ominous role in the development of right-wing
ideology, especially National Socialism in Germany.2057
Exposure of the Protocols as forgery, and general denial of identity between
Bolsheviks and Jews constituted a major share of liberal emigrant journalism of
the 1920s and 1930s. We see several prominent Russians there: Milyukov,
Rodichev, Burtsev and Kartashev.
A.V. Kartashev, historian of religion, Orthodox theologian and at the same
time, a public figure, wrote about the unacceptability of anti-Semitism for a
Christian in the pre-revolutionary collection Shchit [Shield],2058 which I have
often cited. In 1922, in emigration, he wrote the foreword to Yu. Delevskys
book on the Protocols.2059 In 1937 Burtsev too asked him to write a foreword for
his book. Kartashev wrote in it: A man with common sense, good will and a
little scientific discipline cannot even discuss the authenticity of this police and
journalistic forgery, though certainly a talented forgery, able to infect the
ignorant. Its unfair to continue supporting this obvious deceit after it has
been so unambiguously exposed. Yet it is equally unfair to do the opposite, to
exploit the easy victory over the Protocols authenticity to dismiss legitimate
concerns. A half-truth is a lie. The whole truth is that the Jewish question is
posed before the world as one of the tragic questions of history. And it cannot be
resolved either by savage pogroms, or by libel and lies, but only by honest and
open efforts of all mankind. Pogroms and slander make a sensible and honest

Burtsev published this information in 1938 in Paris in his study of the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. See V. L. Burtsev. V pogone za provokatorami. Protokoly sionskikh
mudretsov dokazanny podlog [Chasing the Provocateurs. Protocols of the Elders of Zion
is a proven forgery]. Foreword by Yu. V. Davydov, annotation by L. G. Aronov. Moscow,
1991.
2055SJE, v.6, p. 847.
2056Ibid.
2057SJE, v.6, p. 848.
2058A. V. Kartashev. Izbrannye i pomilovannye [The Chosen and the Pardoned]. // Sheet:
Literaturny sbornik [Shield: Literary Collection]. Edited by L. Andreev, M. Gorky and F.
Sologub. The 3rd Enlarged Edition. Moscow, Russian Society on Study of Jewish Life,
1916, p. 110-115.
2059Yu. Delevsky. Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov: istorija odnogo podloga [Protocols of the
Elders of Zion: the History of a Forgery]. Berlin, 1923.
raising of the question more difficult, degrading it to outright stupidity and
absurdity. They confuse the Jews themselves, who constantly emphasize their
oppressed innocence and expect from everybody else nothing but sympathy
and some sort of obligatory Judeophilia. Kartashev certainly regarded
debunking of this sensational apocrypha as a moral duty, but also thought
that in washing out the dust of Protocols from the eyes of the ignorant, it is
unacceptable to impair their vision anew by pretending that this obliterates the
Jewish question itself.2060
Indeed, the Jewish question cannot be removed by either books or
articles. Consider the new reality faced in the 1920s by Jews in the Baltic
countries and Poland. In Baltics, although Jews managed to maintain for a
while their influential position in trade and industry2061 they felt social pressure.
A good half of Russian Jewry lived in the newly independent states. New
states trumpet their nationalism all the louder the less secure they feel. 2062
There Jews feel themselves besieged by a hostile, energetic and restless
popular environment. One day, it is demanded that there be no more Jews
percentage-wise in the institutions of higher learning than in the army the
next, the air of everyday life becomes so tense and stressful that Jews can no
longer breathe. In the self-determined nations, the war against Jews is waged
by the society itself: by students, military, political parties, and ordinary
people. I. Bikerman concluded that in leading the charge for self-
determination, Jews were preparing the ground for their own oppression by
virtue of higher dependence on the alien society.2063 The situation of Jews in
Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania is literally tragic. Yesterdays oppressed are
todays oppressors, what is more extremely uncouth oppressors, entirely
unashamed of their lack of culture.2064
So it transpired that the breakup of Russia also meant the breakup of
Russian Jewry as the history paradoxically showed that the Jews were better
off in the united Russian Empire despite all the oppression. So now in these
splintered border countries Jews became the faithful guardians of the Russian
language, Russian culture, impatiently waiting for the restoration of the great
Russia. Schools that still teach in Russian became filled with Jewish children,
to the exclusion of learning the languages of the newly-formed states. In these

2060State Archive of the Russian Federation, fonds 5802, catalog 1, file 31, p. 417-421. The
foreword by A. V. Kartashev was not published by V. L. Burtsev in 1938 but was preserved
among his papers. We discovered the fact of existence of this foreword from the article of
O. Budnitsky Evreiskij vopros v emigranskoj publitsistike 1920-1930-kh [The Jewish
Question in Emigrant Journalism of 1920-1930s]. // Evrei i russkaja revolutsia: Materialy
i issledovanija [Jews and the Russian Revolution: Materials and Studies]. Edited by O. V.
Budnitsky; Moscow, Jerusalem. Gesharim, 1999.
2061I. Gar. Evrei v Pribaltijskikh stranakh pod nemetskoj okkupatsiej [Jews in the Baltic
countries under German Occupation]. // BRJ-2, p. 95.
2062To the Jews of the World! // RJ, p. 6.
2063I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 87-89.
2064D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
219.
tiny countries, the Russian Jew, accustomed to life in the open swathes of a
great empire, feels uncomfortable, squeezed and diminished in his social status,
despite all the civil rights and autonomy. Indeed our peoples fate is bound up
with the fate of the great Russia.2065
Still, the position of Jewry in the circles of international post-war politics
was strong, especially in Paris, and in particular regarding Zionism. In July
1922 the League of Nations recognised the World Zionist Organization as the
Jewish Agency, which first and foremost represented the interests of Zionists,
and secondly of non-Zionists, and also provided support to the European
Jews.2066
Bikerman accused the Zionists of seeing a fragmented Russia as an
ideal. This is why the organization of Russian Zionists calls itself not Russian,
but Russo-Ukrainian. This is why the Zionists and related Jewish groups so
assiduously fraternized with the Ukrainian separatists.2067

After the Civil War, Soviet Russia sank into a heavy silence. From this
point and for decades to follow, all independent voices were squashed and only
the official line could be heard. And the less was heard from Russia, the louder
was the voice of emigration. All of them, from anarchists to monarchists,
looked back in pain and argued intensely: who and to what extent was to blame
for what had happened?
Discussion developed within emigrant Jewry as well.
In 1923 Bikerman noted: Jews answer everything with a familiar gesture
and familiar words: we know, were to blame; whenever something goes wrong,
youll look for a Jew and find one. Ninety percents of what is written in the
contemporary Jewish press about Jews in Russia is just a paraphrase of this
stereotype. And because its impossible that were always to blame for
everything, Jews take from this the flattering and at first glance quite convenient
conclusion that were always and everywhere in the right.2068
However, consider: Before the revolution, the Jewish society passionately
argued that a revolution would save the Jews, and we still ardently adhere to
this position. When the Jewish organizations gather resources in the West to
aid their co-ethnics, suffering in the USSR, they denounce, belittle, and slander
everything about pre-revolutionary Russia, including the most positive and
constructive things; See, the Bolshevik Russia has now become the Promised
Land, egalitarian and socialist. Many Jews who emigrated from Russia settled
in the United States, and pro-Bolshevik attitudes spread quickly among
them.2069 The general Jewish mood was that Bolshevism was better than
2065I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 84, 89.
2066SJE, v.7, p. 890.
2067I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 40.
2068Ibid., p. 12.
2069Ibid., p. 47, 48, 72.
restoration of monarchy. It was widely believed that the fall of Bolshevism in
Russia would inevitably engender a new wave of bloody Jewish pogroms and
mass extermination. And it is on this basis that Bolshevism is preferred as the
lesser evil.2070
Then, as if to confirm that Bolsheviks are changing for the better, that they
can learn, the NEP came! Theyve loosened their suffocating grip on the
economy, and that made them all the more acceptable. First NEP, then some
concessions hopefully, itll all work out for us.2071
We cannot call the entire Jewish emigration pro-Bolshevik. Yet they did not
see the Bolshevik state as their main enemy, and many still sympathized with it.
Yet a noteworthy incident, mockingly described in Izvestiya, happened to
Goryansky, a Jewish emigrant writer.2072 In 1928, the already famous Babel (and
already well-known for his links to the Cheka) was temporarily residing in
Paris to muster creative inspiration. While in the Cafe Rotonda he noticed his
old acquaintance, probably from Odessa, who magnanimously offered his
hand to him: Greetings, Goryansky. But Goryansky stood up and
contemptuously turned away from the offered hand.
Rise of Hitlerism in Germany naturally and for a long time reinforced the
preference for Bolshevism in the social mind of the European Jewry.
The First International Jewish Congress took place in Vienna in August
1936. M. Vishnyak disapprovingly suggested that the collective attitude toward
the Bolshevik regime was perfectly exemplified by the opinion of N. Goldman:
if all sorts of freedom-loving governments and organizations flatter and even
fawn before the Bolsheviks why shouldnt supporters of Jewish ethnic and
cultural independence follow the same path? Only Moscows open support
for anti-Jewish violence in Palestine slightly cooled the Congress leaders
disposition toward the Soviet state. Even then they only protested the
banning of Hebrew and the banning of emigration from the USSR to
Palestine, and, finally, they objected to the continuing suffering of Zionists in
political prisons and concentration camps. Here N. Goldman found both the
necessary words and inspiration.2073 In 1939 on the eve of the World War II, S.
Ivanovich noted: It cannot be denied that among emigrant Russian Jews the
mood was to rely on the perseverance of the Soviet dictatorship if only to
prevent pogroms.2074
What of Jewish Bolsheviks? I. Bikerman: Prowess doesnt taint that is
our attitude to Bolsheviks who were raised among us and to their satanic evil.
Or the modern version: Jews have the right to have their own Bolsheviks; I
have heard this declaration a thousand times; at a meeting of Jewish emigrants

2070Yu. Delevsky. Menshee li zlo bolsheviki? [Are Bolsheviks the Lesser Evil?] // The Jewish
Tribune, September 19, 1922, p. 2.
2071D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
221.
2072G. Ryklin. Sluchai s babelem [An Incident with Babel]. // Izvestiya, March 16, 1928, p. 5.
2073Poslednie Novosti. August 13, 1936.
2074S. Ivanovich. Evrei i sovetskaya diktatura [Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship]. //
in Berlin one after the other, a respected Kadet, a Democrat, a Zionist ascended
the podium and each proclaimed this right of Jews to have their own
Bolsheviks their right to monstrosity.2075
Here are the consequences of these words: Jewish opinion across the
world turned away from Russia and accepted the Bolsheviks; when a famous,
old, and well respected Jewish public figure a white crow suggested to a
high Jewish dignitary in one of the European capitals organizing a protest
against the executions of Orthodox priests in Russia [i.e. in the USSR], the
latter, after reflecting on the idea, said that it would mean struggling against
Bolshevism, which he considers an impossible thing to do because the collapse
of Bolshevik regime would lead to anti-Jewish pogroms.2076
But if they can live with Bolsheviks, what do they think of the White
movement? When Josef Bikerman spoke in Berlin in November 1922 at the
fifth anniversary of the founding of the White Army, Jewish society in general
was offended and took this as a slight against them.
Meanwhile, Dr. D. S. Pasmanik (who fought on the German front until
February 1917, then in the White Army until May 1919, when he left Russia)
had already finished and in 1923 published in Paris his book Russian
Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism (I cited it here), where he
passionately argued against the commonplace explanation that Bolshevism
originated from the Jewish religion. The identification of Judaism with
Bolshevism is a grave global danger. In 1923, together with I. M. Bikerman, G.
A. Landau, I. O. Levin, D. O. Linsky (also an ex-member of the White Army)
and V. C. Mandel, Pasmanik founded the National Union of Russian Jews
Abroad. This group published an appeal To the Jews of the World! in the same
year, and soon after published a collection Russia and the Jews in Berlin.
Here is how they describe the task they undertook and their feelings.
Pasmanik said: The unspeakable pain of the Jew and the unending sorrow of
the Russian citizen motivated this work. Because of the dark events of the
recent years, it was difficult to find a balanced point of view on both Russian
and Jewish questions. We attempted to merge the interests of the renewed
Russia and of the afflicted Russian Jewry.2077 Linsky: Unfathomed sorrow
dwells in the souls of those who realize their Jewishness while similarly
identifying as Russians. It is much easier when one of the two streams of your
national consciousness dries up, leaving you only a Jew or only a Russian, thus
simplifying your position toward Russias tragic experience.The villainous
years of the revolution killed the shoots of hope for rapprochement between
Jews and Russians that had appeared just before the war; now we witness
active Russo-Jewish divergence.2078 Levin: It is our duty to honestly and
2075I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 23-24.
2076Ibid., p. 54-55.
2077D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaja revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian
Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 7, 14.
2078D. O. Linsky. O natsionalnom samosoznanii russkogo evreja [On the National
Consciousness of the Russian Jew]. // RJ, p. 141, 144-145.
objectively examine the causes of and the extent of Jewish involvement in the
revolution. This might have certain effect on future relations between
Russians and Jews.2079 The co-authors of the collection rightly warned
Russians not to mix up the meaning of the February Revolution and Jewish
involvement in it. Bikerman if anything minimised this involvement (the power
balance between the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Soldiers and
Workers Deputies and the Provisional Government was for the most part
unclear to contemporaries). However he thought that after the October
Bolshevik coup the Jewish right to have their Bolsheviks implies a duty to
have also their right-wingers and extreme right-wingers, the polar opposites of
the Bolsheviks.2080 Pasmanik: In all its varieties and forms, Bolshevik
communism is an evil and true foe of Jewry, as it is first of all the enemy of
personal identity in general and of cultural identity in particular.2081 Bound by
a plethora of intimate connections to our motherland, to its political system,
economy and culture, we cannot flourish while the country disintegrates around
us.2082
Obviously, these authors were fully aware of the significance of the Russian
catastrophe. In describing those years, I heavily relied on the work of these
people with the hope that their bitter, but not at all self-hating, reflections can
finally be understood and comprehended in their entirety.
Their 1923 Proclamation stated: The National Union of Russian Jews
Abroad firmly believes that the Bolsheviks epitomize the greatest evil for the
Jews as well as for all other peoples of Russia. It is time for the Jew to stop
tremble at the thought of going against the revolution. Rather, the Jew should
fear going against his motherland [Russia] and his people [Jewish].2083
However, the authors of Russia and the Jews saw the Jewish national
consciousness of the early 1920s as something very different from what theyve
thought it should have been. Almost all circles and classes of Russian society
are now engaged in grievous self-reflections, trying to comprehend what has
happened.Whether these self-accusations and admissions of guilt are fair or
not, they at least reveal the work of thought, conscience, and aching hearts.
But it would be no exaggeration to claim that such spiritual work is the least
noticeable among the Jewish intelligentsia, which is no doubt a symptom of
certain morbidity. For an outsider it appears that a typical Jewish intellectual
has no concerns.2084 For this intellectual everyone else is to blame the
government, the generals, the peasants, etc. He has nothing to do with all this.
In no way did he forge his own destiny and the destinies of those around him;

2079I. O. Levin. Evrei v revolutsii [The Jews in the Revolution]. // RJ, p. 124.
2080I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 24.
2081D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
215.
2082To the Jews of the World! // RJ, p. 5.
2083Ibid., p. 7-8.
2084G. A. Landau. Revolutsionnye idei v evreiskoi obshchestvennosti [Revolutionary Ideas in
Jewish Society]. // RJ, p. 100.
he is just a passersby, hit on the head by a falling brick; so they were
complicit in destroying [the world around them], but after it was finished they
became unaware of their role in it.2085
Jewish Bolsheviks was a particular pain for the authors. A sin that carries
the seed of its own nemesis, what greater affliction is there for a people than
to see its sons debauched?2086 It is not just that the Russian upheaval needed
people of a certain sort for its perpetuation, or that the Jewish society provided
this sort of people; what is most important is that they were not rebuffed, did
not meet enough opposition from within their own society. 2087 It is our duty to
shoulder the struggle specifically against the Jewish Bolsheviks, against all
kinds of YevSeks [the Jewish Section, the name given to officials appointed by
the Soviets to deal with Jewish affairs], and against Jewish commissars in
general.2088
It should be noted that these authors were not alone in arguing that Russian
(and now emigrant) Jews should fight against the Bolsheviks. From the pages of
the Jewish Tribune: If Bolshevism was swept from power in Russia by a wave
of popular wrath, Jewry might be held, in the eyes of the masses, responsible for
prolonging Bolshevisms lifespan. Only active participation in the struggle to
liquidate Bolshevism can secure Jews a safe position in the common cause of
saving Russia.2089
Bikerman warned: if we support the Bolsheviks on the principle that your
own shirt is closer to the body then we should not forget that we thus allow
the Russian to take care of his own shirt that is closer to his body; that it
justifies the call, Slaughter Yids, Save Russia.2090
What of the Jewish attitudes toward the White Army? This unworthy
attitude that Jews have towards people who have taken upon their shoulders the
endlessly difficult task of fighting for Russia, for the millions of the sheepish
and weak-willed, points out to the complete moral disintegration, to a sort of
perversion of mind. While all of us, Jews and non-Jews alike, placed
ourselves obediently under the communist yoke and our backs under the whip,
there were some Russians, courageous and proud, who overcame all obstacles,
gathered from what remained of the breached and ripped apart fronts [of World
War I], consolidated and raised the banner of resistance. Just that they were
willing to fight under these circumstances alone immortalizes them for the
history. And these people became an object for abuse on the side of so many
Jews, libeled by every loquacious tongue; so instead of appreciation the

2085Ibid., p. 104.
2086To the Jews of the World! // RJ, p. 6.
2087G. A. Landau. Revolutsionnye idei v evreiskoi obshchestvennosti [Revolutionary Ideas in
Jewish Society]. // RJ, p. 118.
2088D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
225.
2089Yu. Delevsky. Menshee li zlo bolsheviki? [Are Bolsheviks the Lesser Evil?] // The Jewish
Tribune, September 19, 1922, p. 3.
2090I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 78.
tragedy, we see epidemic mindlessness, endless laxity of speech, and triumphant
superficiality. And yet the Russia for which the Whites fought is not alien to
us; it is our shirt too.2091 Jewry should have fought for the White cause as for
the cause of Jewish salvation, for only in the restoration and swift rescue of
Russian statehood can Jews find salvation from that death that has never been
as close as in these days.2092
(Death was indeed approaching, although from another direction).
Who would deny these conclusions today, after decades of Soviet regime?
But at that time, only few authors, Jewish or Russian, could see so far ahead.
The Jewish emigrant community as a whole rejected these thoughts. And thus
they had failed the test of history. It might be objected that it did not cause
Jewry a noticeable, significant harm, and certainly it was not the Holocaust
brought by Hitlerism. Yes, it did not bring commeasurable physical harm, but,
historically, its spiritual harm was noticeable; take, for instance, the success of
Bolshevism in the expulsion of the Jewish religion from the country where it
had once deeply spread its sacred roots. And there was more the Jews, by
betting on Bolshevism influenced the overall course of events in Europe.
The authors of the Russia and the Jews appealed in vain: In the many
centuries of Jewish dispersion there has not been a political catastrophe as
deeply threatening to our national existence as the breaking of the Russian
Power, for never have the vital forces of the Jewish people been as united as in
the bygone, living Russia. Even the breakup of the Caliphate can scarcely
compare with the current disaster.2093 For the united Russian Jewry the
breakup of Russia into separate sovereign states is a national calamity.2094 If
there is no place for the Jews in the great spaces of the Russian land, in the
boundlessness of the Russian soul, then there is no space [for Jews] anywhere in
the world. Woe to us, if we do not wise up.2095
Of course, by the very end of the 20th century we can easily reject these
grim prophecies, if only as a matter of fact just as enough space has been
found on earth for formerly Russian Jews, so a Jewish state has been founded
and secured itself, while Russia still lies in ruin, so powerless and humiliated.
The warnings of the authors on how Russia should be treated already appear a
great exaggeration, a failed prophecy. And now we can reflect on these words
only in regard of the spiritual chord that so unexpectedly bound the two our
peoples together in History.

2091Ibid., p. 52, 53-54.

2092D. O. Linsky. O natsionalnom samosoznanii russkogo evreja [On the National
Consciousness of the Russian Jew]. // RJ, p. 149.
2093I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 92.
2094V. S. Mandel. Konservativnye i razrushitelnye elementy v evreisve [Conservative and
Subversive Forces among Jewry]. // RJ, p. 202.
2095D. O. Linsky. O natsionalnom samosoznanii russkogo evreja [On the National
Consciousness of the Russian Jew]. // RJ, p. 153, 154.
 If Russia is not our motherland, then we are foreigners and have no right
to interfere in her national life.2096 Russia will survive; her renaissance must
become our national concern, the concern of the entire Russian Jewry.2097
And in conclusion: The fate of Russian Jewry is inextricably linked to the fate
of Russia; we must save Russia, if we want to save Jewry . The Jews must
fight the molesters of the great country shoulder to shoulder with all other anti-
Bolshevik forces; a consolidated struggle against the common enemy will heal
the rifts and substantially reduce the current dramatic and ubiquitous growth of
anti-Semitism; only by saving Russia, can we prevent a Jewish catastrophe.2098
Catastrophe! this was said ten years before Hitlers ascension to power,
eighteen years before his stunning sweep across the USSR and before the start
of his program of Jewish extermination. Would it have been possible for Hitler
to preach hatred of Jews and communists in Germany so easily and
successfully, to claim Jews and communists are the same, if the Jews were
among the most prominent and persistent opponents of the Soviet regime? The
spiritual search of the authors of Russia and the Jews led them to prophetically
sense the shadow of the impending Jewish Catastrophe, though erring in its
geographical origin and failing to predict other fateful developments. Yet their
dreadful warning remained unheard.
I am not aware of anything else close to Russia and the Jews in the history
of Russian-Jewish relations. It shook the Jewish emigration. Imagine how
hurtful it was to hear such things coming from Jewish lips, from within Jewry
itself.
On the part of Russians, we must learn a lesson from this story as well. We
should take Russia and the Jews as an example of how to love our own people
and at the same time be able to speak about our mistakes, and to do so
mercilessly if necessary. And in doing that, we should never alienate or separate
ourselves from our people. The surest path to social truth is for each to admit
their own mistakes, from each, from every side.
Having devoted much time and thought to these authors (and having
dragged the reader along with me), I would like here to leave a brief record of
their lives.
Josef Menassievich Bikerman (1867-1942) came from a poor petty
bourgeois family. He attended a cheder, then a yeshiva, provided for himself
from the age of fifteen; educated himself under difficult circumstances. In 1903
he graduated from the historical-philological faculty of the Imperial
Novorossiya University (after a two-year-exclusion gap for participation in
student unrest). He opposed Zionism as, in his opinion, an illusory and
reactionary idea. He called on Jews to unite, without relinquishing their spiritual
identity, with progressive forces in Russia to fight for the good of the common
2096D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
227-228.
2097I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 93.
2098D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
217-218.
motherland. His first article was a large tract on Zionism published in the
Russkoe Bogatstvo [Russian Treasure] (1902, issue 7), which was noticed and
debated even abroad. In 1905 he was deeply involved into the Liberation
movement. He worked in several periodicals: Syn Otechestva [Son of the
Fatherland], Russkoe Bogatstvo, Nash Den [Our day], Bodroe Slovo [Buoyant
Word]. As an emigrant he was printed in the Paris Vozrozhdenie, when it was
run by P. B. Struve.
Daniil Samoilovich Pasmanik (1869-1930) was a son of Melamed (a
teacher in a cheder). In 1923 he graduated from the medical faculty of Zurich
University and then practiced medicine in Bulgaria for seven years. In 1899-
1905 he was the freelance lecturer in the medical faculty at Geneva University.
He joined Zionist movement in 1900 and became one of its leading theorists
and publicists. He returned to Russia in 1905 and passed the medical license
exam. He participated in the struggle for civil rights for Jews; he opposed the
Bund and worked on the program for Poale-Zion; in 1906-1917 he was a
member of the Central Committee of the Russian Zionist organization. He was
a member of editorial boards of Evreiskaya Zhizn [Jewish Life], and then of
Rassvet. He wrote many articles for Evreisky Mir [Jewish World] and the Jewish
Encyclopaedia. He published his medical works in specialized journals in
German and French. Pasmanik was in Vienna when the WWI broke out in 1914,
from where he with great difficulty managed to return to Russia; he joined the
army and served in field hospitals until February 1917. He joined the Kadets
after the February Revolution; he supported General Kornilov and the White
movement; in 1918-1919 he was involved in the White government of the
Crimea, was elected chairman of the Union of the Jewish Communities of the
Crimea. In 1919 he emigrated from Russia to France. In 1920-1922 in Paris he
together with V. L. Burtsev edited the White migr newspaper Obshchee Delo
[The Common Cause]. Overall, he authored hundreds of articles and tens of
books; the most notable of them include Wandering Israel: The Psychology of
Jewry in Dispersion (1910), Fates of the Jewish People: The Problems of
Jewish Society (1917), The Russian Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and
Judaism (1923) The Revolutionary Years in Crimea (1926), What Is Judaism?
(French edition, 1930).
Isaak Osipovich Levin (1876-1944) was a historian and publicist. Before
the revolution, he worked as a foreign affairs commentator for Russkie
Vedomosti [Russian Journal] and for the P. B. Struves magazine, Russkaya
Mysl [Russian Thought]. He emigrated first to Berlin. He was a member of the
Russian Institute of Science, worked in the Rul, Russkie Zapiski and in the
historical-literary almanac Na Chuzhoi Storone [In the Foreign Land]; he
regularly gave presentations (in particular on the topic of the rise of German
anti-Semitism). He moved to Paris in 1931 or 1932. He was widowed and lived
in poverty. Among his works are Emigration during the French Revolution and
a book in French about Mongolia. During the German occupation he registered
according to his racial origins as was required by authorities; he was arrested
in the early 1943, for a short time was held in a concentration camp near Paris,
then deported; he died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
Grigory (Gavriel) Adolfovich Landau (1877-1941) was son of the well-
known publicist and publisher A. E. Landau. He graduated from the law faculty
of the St. Petersburg University in 1902. He wrote for periodicals from 1903
(the newspapers Voskhod [Sunrise], Nash Den, Evreiskoe Obozrenie [Jewish
Observer], the magazines Bodroe Slovo, Evreisky Mir, Vestnik Evropy
[European Herald], Sovremennik, Severnye Zapiski [Northern Notes], the yearly
almanac Logos). He was one of the founders of the Jewish Democratic Group in
1904 and the Union for Equal Rights for Jews in Russia in 1905. He was an
outstanding Kadet, member of the Central Committee of the Kadet Party. In
August 1917 he participated in the Government Conference in Moscow; from
December 1917 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Jewish
Community of Petrograd. He emigrated to Germany in 1919; from 1922 to
1931he was I. V. Gessens deputy at Rul. Apart from Rul, he also wrote for the
magazine, Russkaya Mysl, the weekly, Russia and the Slavs, the collection
Chisla [Dates], etc. He often lectured at migr evenings (in 1927 in the talk
titled The Eurasian Delusion he criticised eurasianism as the movement
contrary to the values of Russian history and leading to ideological
Bolshevism). From Nazi Germany he fled for Latvia, where he worked for the
Riga newspaper Segodnya [Today]. He was arrested by the NKVD in June 1941
and died in the Usollag camp (near Solikamsk) in November. 2099 Among his
works the most influential were Clownish Culture (in Nash Den, 1908), the
article Twilight of Europe (Severnye Zapiski, 1914, issue 12), which antedated
much of what would later bestow worldwide fame on Oswald Spengler 2100
(and later a book with the same title (Berlin, 1923)), Polish-Jewish Relations
(1915), On Overcoming Evil (in the collection book The Works of Russian
Scholars Abroad, Berlin, 1923), The Byzantine and the Hebrew (Russkaya Mysl,
1923, issues 1 and 2), Theses Against Dostoevsky (Chisla, volume 6, Paris,
1932), Epigraphs (Berlin, 1927). Much of what he wrote was dismissed by
contemporaries. He was too conservative in spirit to be accepted by progressive
public. He was a sagacious thinker.
We could not find any substantial information about D. O. Linsky (he
served in the White Army during the Civil War) or V. C. Mandel (active
participant in Russian political life 1907-1918, he emigrated to Berlin and died
in 1931).

2099The information about G. A. Landaus arrest and death was taken from V. Gessen. Iosif
Gessen: jurist, politik i zhurnalist [Josef Gessen: an attorney, politician and journalist]. //
Jews in the Culture of Russia-in-Exile: Articles, Publications, Memoires, and Essays.
Jerusalem, 1993, v. 2, p. 543.
2100Fyodor Stepun. Byvshee i nesbyvsheesja [What Have Been and What Might-have-been].
The 2nd Edition. London, Overseas Publications, 1990, v. 1, p. 301.
 In Russia and the Jews the behavior of Jewish emigrants during 1920s was
explicitly and harshly admonished. The authors called on their co-ethnics to
admit their own mistakes and not to judge the Great Russia in which they had
lived and which they had made a home for hundreds of years; remember how
they demanded justice for themselves and how upset they are when they are
collectively accused for the acts of some individuals2101; Jews should not be
afraid to acknowledge some responsibility for all that has happened.2102 First
of all we must determine precisely our share of responsibility and so counter
anti-Semitic slander.This is absolutely not about becoming accustomed to
anti-Semitism, as claimed by some Jewish demagogues. This admission is
vital for us, it is our moral duty.2103 Jewry has to pick righteous path worthy of
the great wisdom of our religious teachings which will lead us to brotherly
reconciliation with the Russian people. to build the Russian house and the
Jewish home so they might stand for centuries to come.2104
But we spread storms and thunder and expect to be cradled by gentle
zephyrs. I know you will shriek that I am justifying pogroms! I know how
much these people are worth, who think themselves salt of the earth, the arbiters
of fate, and at the very least the beacons of Israel. They, whose every whisper
is about Black Hundreds and Black Hundreders, they themselves are dark
people, their essence is black, viri obscure indeed, they were never able to
comprehend the power of creativity in human history. It is imperative for
us to make less of a display of our pain, to shout less about our losses. It is
time we understood that crying and wailing is mostly [evidence] of
emotional infirmity, of a lack of culture of the soul. You are not alone in this
world, and your sorrow cannot fill the entire universe when you put on a
display only your own grief, only your own pain it shows disrespect to
others grief, to others sufferings.2105
It could have been said today, and to all of us.
These words cannot be obviated either by the millions lost in the prisons
and camps of the GULag, nor by the millions exterminated in the Nazi death
camps.
The lectures of the authors of Russia and the Jews at that years National
Union of Jews were met with great indignation on the part of emigrant Jewry.
Even when explicitly or tacitly accepting the truth of the facts and the analysis,
many expressed indignation or surprise that anyone dared to bring these into the
open. See, it was not the right time to speak of Jews, to criticise them, to
determine their revolutionary misdeeds and responsibility, when Jewry has just

2101V. S. Mandel. Konservativnye i razrushitelnye elementy v evreisve [Conservative and

Subversive Forces among Jewry]. // RJ, p. 204.
2102D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
210.
2103Ibid., p. 212, 213.
2104D. O. Linsky. O natsionalnom samosoznanii russkogo evreja [On the National
Consciousness of the Russian Jew]. // RJ, p. 152.
2105I. M. Bikerman. Rossija i russkoe evreistvo [Russia and Russian Jewry]. // RJ, p. 74-75.
suffered so much and may suffer even more in the future.2106 The collections
authors were almost declared enemies of the [Jewish] people, the abetters of
reaction and allies of the pogromists.2107
The Jewish Tribune replied them from Paris a few months later: The
question of Jewish responsibility for the Russian revolution has hitherto only
been posed by anti-Semites. But now there is a whole penitent and accusative
movement, apparently we have to not only blame others, but also admit our
own faults; yet there is nothing new apart from the same old boring name
counting [of Jews among Bolsheviks]. Too late did Mr. Landau come to
love the old statehood; penitent Jews turned reactionaries; their words
are incompatible with the dignity of the Jewish people and are completely
irresponsible.2108 Especially offensive was this attempt to separate the
popular anti-Semitism from the official one, attempting to prove that the
people, the society, the country the entire populace hates the Jews and
considers them the true culprit responsible for all national woes; just like those
who connived the pogroms, they repeat the old canard about the popular
anger.2109 Sometimes it descended into the outright abuse: this group of
Berlin journalists and activists, which has nearly disappeared from the Jewish
public life by now craves to put themselves into limelight again and for
that they could think of no better way than to attack their own compatriots,
Russian Jews; this tiny group of loyalists Jews are blinded by a desire to
turn the wheel of history backwards, they write indecencies, give comical
advice, take on themselves the ridiculous role of healers to cure national
wounds. They should remember that sometimes it is better to stay quiet.2110
One sophisticated modern critic could find a better assessment for that
collection than a severe hysteria. Both that attempt and their later journey are
genuine tragedies, in his opinion, and he explains this tragedy as a self-hatred
complex.2111
Yet was Bikerman hateful when he wrote, on his later tragic journey, that:
The Jewish people is not a sect, not an order, but a whole people, dispersed
over the world but united in itself; it has raised up the banner of peaceful labour
and has gathered around this banner, as around the symbol of godly order?2112

2106G. A. Landau. Revolutsionnye idei v evreiskoi obshchestvennosti [Revolutionary Ideas in

Jewish Society]. // RJ, p. 100-101.
2107D. S. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya [What Do We Want to Achieve?]. // RJ, p.
226.
2108A. Kulisher. Ob otvetstvennosti i bezotvetstvennosti [On Responsibility and
Irresponsibility]. // The Jewish Tribune, April 6, 1923, p. 3-4.
2109B. Mirsky. I6 punktov [16 Points]. // The Jewish Tribune, April 7, 1924, p. 2.
2110S. Pozner. V chem zhe delo? [So Whats the problem?] // The Jewish Tribune, April 7,
1924, p. 1-2.
2111Sh. Markish. O evreiskoj nenavisti k Rossii [On the Jewish Hatred Toward Russia]. //
22: Obshchestvenno-politichesky i literaturny zhurnal evreyskoj intelligentsii iz SSSR v
Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in
Israel]. Tel-Aviv, 1984, (38), p. 218.
 However it is not true that European or migr Jews did not at all hark to
such explanations or warnings. A similar discussion had taken place a little
earlier, in 1922. In the re-established Zionist publication Rassvet the nationalist
G. I. Shekhtman expressed his incomprehension at how the intelligentsia of
other nationalities could be anything other than nationalistic. An intelligentsia is
invariably connected to its own nationality and feels its pains. A Jew cannot be a
Russian democrat, but naturally a Jewish democrat. I do not recognise
dual national or democratic loyalties. And if the Russian intelligentsia does
not identify with its nationality (Herzen), it is simply because until now it has
not had the opportunity or need to feel sharp pains over its national identity, to
worry about it. But that has changed now. Now the Russian intelligentsia has
to cast aside its aspirations to be a universal All-Russian intelligentsia, and
instead to regard itself as the Great Russian democracy.2113
It was difficult to counter. The gauntlet was picked up by P. N. Milyukov,
though not very confidently. We remember (see Chapter 11) that back in 1909
he had also expressed horror at the unveiling of this stinging, unpleasant
national question who benefits? But now this new awkward situation (and not
a change in Milyukovs views), when so many Russian intellectuals in
emigration suddenly realized that they lost their Russia, forced Milyukov to
amend his previous position. He replied to Shekhtman, though in a rather
ambiguous manner and not in his own (highly popular) Poslednie Novosti, but
in the Jewish Tribune with much smaller circulation, to the effect that a Russian
Jew could and had to be a Russian democrat. Milyukov treaded carefully:
but when this demand is fulfilled, and there appears a new national face of
Russian Democracy (the Great Russian), well, wouldnt Shekhtman be first to
get scared at the prospect of empowerment of ethnically conscious Great
Russian Democracy with imperial ambitions. Do we then need these
phantoms? Is this what we wish to ruin our relations over?2114
The migrs lived in an atmosphere of not just verbal tension. There was a
sensational murder trial in Paris in 1927 of a clock-maker Samuel Shvartsbard,
who lost his whole family in the pogroms in Ukraine, and who killed Petliura
with five bullets.2115 (Izvestiya sympathetically reported on the case and printed
Shvartsbards portrait.2116) The defence raised the stakes claiming that the
murder was a justified revenge for Petliuras pogroms: The defendant wished
and felt a duty to raise the issue of anti-Semitism before the worlds
conscience.2117 The defence called many witnesses to testify that during the

2112I. M. Bikerman. K samopoznaniju evreya: chem. my byli, chem. my stali, chem. my

dolzhny stat [On the Self-knowledge of the Jew: Who We Were, Who We Are, Who We
Must Become]. Paris, 1939, p. 25.
2113P. N. Milyukov. Natsionalnost i natsia [Ethnicity and Nation]. // The Jewish Tribune,
September 1, 1922, p. 1-2.
2114Ibid.
2115Poslednie Novosti. October 14, 1927, p. 2; October 19, 1927, p. 1-2.
2116Izvestiya, October 21, p. 3.
2117Izvestiya, October 22, p. 1.
Civil War Petliura had been personally responsible for pogroms in Ukraine. The
prosecution suggested that the murder had been ordered by Cheka.
Shvartsbard, agitated, called out from his place: [the witness] doesnt want to
admit that I acted as a Jew, and so claims Im a Bolshevik. 2118 Shvartsbard was
acquitted by the French court. Denikin [a leading White general during the Civil
War] was mentioned at that trial, and Shvartsbards lawyer proclaimed: If you
wish to bring Denikin to trial, I am with you; I would have defended the one
who would have taken revenge upon Denikin with the same passionate
commitment as I am here defending the man who had taken revenge upon
Petliura.2119 And as Denikin lived in Paris without guards, anyone wishing to
take revenge upon him had an open road. However Denikin was never put on
trial. (A similar murder happened later in Moscow in 1929, when Lazar
Kolenberg shot the former White general Slashchev, [who after the Civil War
returned to Russia and served in Soviet military], for doing nothing to stop
pogroms in Nikolayev. During the investigation, the accused was found to be
mentally incompetent to stand trial and released.2120) During Shvartsbards trial
the prosecutor drew a parallel to another notorious case (that of Boris Koverda):
for Petliura had previously lived in Poland, but you [speaking to Shvartsbard]
did not attempt to kill him there, as you knew that in Poland you would be tried
by military tribunal.2121 In 1929, a young man, Boris Koverda, also wishing to
present a problem before the worlds conscience, had killed the Bolshevik
sadist Voikov; he was sentenced to ten years in jail and served his full term.
A White migr from Revolutionary Terrorist Boris Savinkovs group,
Captain V. F. Klementiev, told me that in Warsaw at that time former Russian
officers were abused as White-Guard rascals and that they were not served in
Jewish-owned shops. Such was the hostility, and not just in Warsaw.
Russian migrs all over Europe were flattened by scarcity, poverty,
hardship, and they quickly tired of the showdown over who is more to blame?
Anti-Jewish sentiments among them abated in the second half of the 1920s.
During these years Vasily Shulgin wrote: Are not our visa ordeals remarkably
similar to the oppression experienced by Jews in the Pale of Settlement? Arent
our Nansen passports [internationally recognized identity cards first issued by
the League of Nations to stateless refugees], which are a sort of wolf ticket
obstructing movement, reminiscent of the Jewish religion label, which we
stamped in Jewish passports in Russia, thereby closing many doors to them? Do
we not resort to all kinds of middleman jobs when we are unable to attain,
because of our peculiar position, a civil servant post or a certain profession?
Are we not gradually learning to work around laws that are inconvenient for
us, precisely as Jews did with our laws, and for which we criticized them?2122
2118Izvestiya, October 23, p. 1.
2119Poslednie Novosti. October 25, 1927, p. 2; October 26, 1927, p. 1.
2120Russian Jewish Encyclopedia. The 2nd Revised and Enlarged Edition. Moscow, 1995, v. 2,
p. 59.
2121Poslednie Novosti. October 23, 1927, p. 1.
2122V. V. Shulgin, p. 156.
 Yet during these same years anti-Jewish sentiments were on the rise in the
USSR and were even reported in the Soviet press, causing distress among
Jewish migrs. So in May 1928 a public debate on anti-Semitism was
organized in Paris among them. A report of it was placed in the Milyukovs
newspaper.2123 (Bikermans and Pasmaniks group, already non-active, did not
participate.)
The formal reason for the debate was a strong rise of Judeophobia in
Russia, a phenomenon that periodically occurs there. The Socialist
Revolutionary N. D. Avksentiev chaired the debate, and there were more
Russians than Jews among the public. Mark Slonim explained that the long
oppressed Russian Jewry, having finally attained freedom, has dashed to secure
formerly prohibited positions, and this annoys Russians. In essence, the past
fatefully determined the present. Bad things of the past (Tsarist times)
resulted in bad consequences. S. Ivanovich stated that Jews were now
tormented in the USSR, because it has become impossible to torment the
bourgeois thanks to the NEP. But what is worrying is that the Russian
intelligentsia in the USSR, although neutral on the Jewish question, now takes
the liberty to think: good, it will begin with anti-Semitism, and lead to the
Russian freedom. What a dangerous and foolish illusion.
Such apologetic ideas outraged the next orator, V. Grosman: It is as if
Jewry stands accused! The question needs to be considered more deeply:
There is no reason to distinguish Soviet anti-Semitism from the anti-Semitism
of old Russia, that is to say there is still the same Black Hundredism so dear to
Russian hearts. This is not a Jewish question, but a Russian one, a question of
Russian culture.
(But if it is so quintessentially Russian, entirely Russian, inherently Russian
problem, then what can be done? What need then for a mutual dialogue?)
The author of the debate report, S. Litovtsev, regretted post factum that it
was necessary to find for the debate several honest people, brave enough to
acknowledge their anti-Semitism and frankly explain why they are anti-Semites
Who would say simply, without evasiveness: I dont like this and that about
Jews Alongside there should have been several equally candid Jews who
would say: and we dont like this and that about you Rest assured, such an
honest and open exchange of opinions, with goodwill and a desire for mutual
comprehension, would be really beneficial for both Jews and Russians and for
Russia.2124
Shulgin replied to this: Now, among Russian migrs, surely one needs
more bravery to declare oneself a philo-Semite. He extended his answer into a
whole book, inserting Litovtsevs question into the title, What we dont like
about them.2125

2123Poslednie Novosti. May 29, 1928.

2124S. Litovtsev. Disput ob antisemitizme [Debate on Anti-Semitism]. // Poslednie Novosti,
May 29, 1928, p. 2.
2125V. V. Shulgin, p. 11.
 Shulgins book was regarded as anti-Semitic, and the proposed
interexchange of views never took place. Anyway, the impending
Catastrophe, coming from Germany, soon took the issue of any debate off the
table.
A Union of Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia was created in Paris as if in the
attempt to preserve a link between the two cultures. Yet it soon transpired that
life in exile had created a chasm between fathers and sons, and the latter no
longer understand what a Russian-Jewish intelligentsia is.2126 So the fathers
sadly acknowledged that the Russian Jews, who used to lead global Jewry in
spiritual art and in the nation building, now virtually quit the stage. 2127 Before
the war, the Union had managed to publish only the first issue of collection
Jewish world. During the war, those who could, fled across the ocean and
untiringly created the Union of Russian Jews in New York City, and published
the second issue of the Jewish World. In the 1960s, they published the Book of
Russian Jewry in two volumes, about pre- and post-revolutionary Jewish life in
Russia. The bygone life in the bygone Russia still attracted their minds.
In this work I cite all these books with gratitude and respect.

2126S. M. Ginzburg. O russko-evreiskoi intelligentsia [On Russian Jewish Intelligentsia]. // JW-

1, p. 33.
2127Foreword // JW-1, p. 7.
 Chapter 18. In the 1920s

The twenties in the Soviet Union was an epoch with a unique atmosphere a
grand social experiment which intoxicated world liberal opinion for decades.
And in some places this intoxication still persists. However, almost no one
remains of those who drank deeply of its poisonous spirit.
The uniqueness of that spirit was manifested in the ferocity of class
antagonism, in the promise of a never-before-seen new society, in the novelty of
new forms of human relationships, in the breakdown of the nations economy,
daily life and family structure. The social and demographic changes were, in
fact, colossal.
The great exodus of the Jewish population to the capitals began, for
many reasons, during the first years of communist power. Some Jewish writers
are categorical in their description: Thousands of Jews left their settlements
and a handful of southern towns for Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev to find real
life.2128
Beginning in 1917, Jews flooded into Leningrad and Moscow. 2129
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, hundreds of thousands of Jews moved
to Moscow, Leningrad and other major centers,2130 in 1920, 28,000 Jews lived
in Moscow by 1923, about 86,000; according to 1926 USSR census, 131,000
and in 1933, 226,500.2131 Moscow became fashionable, they used to say half-
seriously in Odessa.
Lurie-Larin, a fanatical and zealous Bolshevik leader during War
Communism writes that in the first years not less than a million Jews left their
settlements; in 1923 about half of Ukraines Jews lived in large cities, pouring
as well into parts of Russia formerly off-limits to Jews (so called prohibited
provinces) from Ukraine and Byelorussia, into Transcaucasia and Central Asia.
The magnitude of this flow was half a million, and four-fifth of them settled in
RSFSR. One in five of the Jewish migrants went to Moscow.2132

2128. . // , -,
1981, 20-26 ( 84), . 7.
2129. . , // , -, 1981, 28 -4 ( 82),
. 4.
2130 ( ). , 1976. . 1, . 235.
2131 , . 5, . 477-478.
2132. . ( . ). .;.: , 1929, .
58-60.
 M. Agursky considers Larins numbers to be substantially undercounted
and points out that this demographic change affected interests important to the
Russian population.2133
During War Communism with its ban on private trade and limitations on
craftsmen and on those of certain social origins there arose a new social
category the deprived (deprived of civil rights). Many Jews were deprived
of civil rights and numbered among the deprived . Still, the migration of the
Jewish population from Byelorussia into the interior of the USSR, mainly to
Moscow and Leningrad did not slow.2134 The new arrivals joined relatives or
co-ethnics who offered communal support.
According to the 1926 USSR census, 2,211,000 or 83% of the Jewish
population lived in cities and towns. 467,000 lived in rural districts. Another
300,000 did not identify themselves as Jews and these were practically all city
dwellers. About five out of six Jews in the USSR were urban dwellers,
constituting up to 23% and 40% of the urban population in Ukraine and
Byelorussia respectively.2135
Most striking in the provincial capitals and major cities was the flow of
Jews into the apparatus of the Soviet government. Ordzhonikidze in 1927 at the
15th Communist Party Congress reported on the national make up of our
party. By his statistics Jews constituted 11.8% of the Soviet government of
Moscow; 22.6% in Ukraine (30.3% in Kharkov, the capital); 30.6% in
Byelorussia (38.3% in Minsk).2136 If true, then the percentage of Jews in urban
areas about equaled that of Jews in the government.
Solomon Schwartz, using data from the work of Lev Singer maintained that
the percentage of Jews in the Soviet government was about the same as their
percentage of the urban population (and it was significantly lower in the
Bolshevik party itself).2137 Using Ordzhonikidzes data, Jews at 1.82% of the
population by 1926 were represented in the Apparatus at about 6.5 times their
proportion in the population at large.
Its easy to underestimate the impact of the sudden freedom from pre-
revolutionary limits on civil rights: Earlier, power was not accessible to Jews
at all and now they had more access to power than anyone else according to I.
Bikerman.2138 This sudden change provoked a varied reaction in all strata of
society. S. Schwartz writes from the mid-twenties there arose a new wave of
anti-Semitism which was not related to the old anti-Semitism, nor a legacy of
2133. . -. : YMCA-Press, 1980, . 265.
2134, . 1, . 326.
2135. , . 63-64, 74.
2136Izvestia, 1927, 11 dc.. p. 1.
2137.. . . -: - . , 1952,
. 44-46, 48-49 ( : . .
- . ., 1927. . 1;
(- ) .; .: , 1932).
2138.. . // : . 1 ( ) /
. : YMCA-Press, 1978, .
28 [1- . : , 1924].
the past. It is an extreme exaggeration to explain it as originating with
backwards workers from rural areas as anti-Semitism generally was not a fact of
life in the Russian countryside. No, It was a much more dangerous
phenomenon. It arose in the middle strata of urban society and reached the
highest levels of the working class which, before the revolution, had remained
practically untouched by the phenomenon. It reached students and members of
the communist party and the Komsomol and, even earlier, local government in
smaller provincial towns where an aggressive and active anti-Semitism took
hold.2139
The Jewish Encyclopedia writes that from the beginning of the 20th century
though official Soviet propaganda writes that anti-Semitism in the latter part of
the 20?s was a legacy of the past, the facts show that, it arose mainly as a
result of colliding social forces in large cities. It was fanned by the widely
held opinion that power in the country had been seized by Jews who formed the
nucleus of the Bolsheviks.2140 Bikerman wrote with evident concern in 1923
that the Jew is in all corners and on all levels of power. The Russian sees
him as a ruler of Moscow, at the head of the capital on Neva [Petrograd], and at
the head of the Red Army, a perfected death machine. He sees that St. Vladimir
Prospect has been renamed Nakhimson Prospect The Russian sees the Jew as
judge and hangman; he sees Jews at every turn, not only among the
communists, but among people like himself, everywhere doing the bidding of
Soviet power not surprising, the Russian, comparing present with past, is
confirmed in his idea that power is Jewish power, that it exists for Jews and
does the bidding of Jews.2141
No less visible than Jewish participation in government was the suddenly
created new order in culture and education.
The new societal inequality was not so much along the lines of nationality
as it was a matter of town versus country. The Russian reader needs no
explanation of the advantages bestowed by Soviet power from the 20s to the
80s on capital cities when compared to the rest of the country. One of the main
advantages was the level of education and range of opportunities for higher
learning. Those established during the early years of Soviet power in capital
cities assured for their children and grandchildren future decades of advantages,
vis a vis those in the country. The enhanced opportunities in post-secondary
education and graduate education meant increased access to the educated elite.
Meanwhile, from 1918 the ethnic Russian intelligentsia was being pushed to the
margins.
In the 20s students already enrolled in institutions of higher learning
were expelled based on social origins policy. Children of the nobility, the clergy,
government bureaucrats, military officers, merchants, even children of petty
shop keepers were expelled. Applicants from these classes and children of the

2139.. . , . 7, 17, 25, 29, 39.

2140PEJ. t. 8, pp. 161-162.
2141.. . // , . 22-23.
intelligentsia were denied entry to institutions of higher learning in the years
that followed. As a nationality repressed by the Tsars regime, Jews did not
receive this treatment. Despite bourgeois origin, the Jewish youth was freely
accepted in institutions of higher learning. Jews were forgiven for not being
proletarian.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, with the absence of limitations
based upon nationality for entry to institutions of higher learning, Jews came to
make up 15.4% of all university students in the USSR, almost twice their
proportion of the urban population at large.2142 Further, Jews owing to a high
level of motivation quickly bypassed the unprepared proletarian factory
workers who had been pushed forward in the education system, and proceeded
unhindered into graduate school. In the 20s and 30s and for a long time after,
Jews were a disproportionately large part of the intelligentsia.
According to G. Aronson, wide access to higher and specialized education
led to the formation of cadres of doctors, teachers and particularly engineers and
technical workers among Jews, which naturally led to university faculty posts in
the expanding system of higher education2143 and in the widely proliferating
research institutions. In the beginning of 1920s, the post of the State Chair of
Science was occupied not by a scientist but a Bolshevik official, Mandelshtam-
Lyadov.2144
Even sharper changes gripped the economic life of the country. Bukharin
publicly announced at a Communist Party conference in 1927 that during War
Communism, we purged the Russian petty and middle bourgeoisie along with
leading capitalists. When the economy was later opened up to free trade petty
and middle Jewish bourgeoisie took the place of the Russian bourgeoisie and
roughly the same happened with our Russian intelligentsia which bucked and
sabotaged our efforts Its place has been taken in some areas by the Jewish
intelligentsia. Moreover, Jewish bourgeousie and intelligentsia are
concentrated in our central regions and cities, where they moved in from
western provinces and southern towns. Here even in the Party ranks one often
encounters anti-Semitic tendencies. Comrades, we must wage a fierce battle
against anti-Semitism.2145
Bukharin described a situation that was obvious to all. Unlike Russian
bourgeosie, the Jewish bourgeoisie was not destroyed. The Jewish merchant,
much less likely to be damned as a man of the past, found defenders.
Relatives or sympathizers in the Soviet Apparatus warned about pending
arrests or seizures. And if he lost anything it was just capital, not life.
Cooperation was quasi-official through the Jewish Commissariat at the

2142, . 8, . 186
2143. . // , 1917-
1967 ( -2). -: , 1968, . 137.
2144 ( ). 2- ., . . ., 1995.
. 2, . 218.
2145. . [ XXIV ] // , 1927, 2
, . 4.
Sovnarkom. The Jews until now had been a repressed people and that meant,
naturally, they needed help. Larin explained the destruction of the Russian
bourgeoisie as a correction of the injustice that existed under the Tsars before
the Revolution.2146
When NEP (New Economic Policy) was crushed, the blow fell with less
force against Jewish NEPmen owing to connections in Soviet ruling circles.
Bukharin had been speaking in answer to a remarkable speech by Prof. Y.V.
Klyutchnikov, a publicist and a former Kadet [Translators note:
Constitutional Democrat]. In December 1926, the professor spoke at a
meeting on the Jewish question at the Moscow Conservatory. We have
isolated expressions of hooliganism Its source is the hurt national feelings of
Russians. The February Revolution established the equality of all citizens of
Russia, including Jews. The October Revolution went further with the Russian
nation proclaiming self-renunciation. A certain imbalance has developed with
respect to the proportion of the Jewish population in the country as a whole and
the positions they have temporarily occupied in the cities. We are in our own
cities and they arrive and squeeze us out. When Russians see Russian women,
elders and children freezing on the street 9 to 11 hours a day, getting soaked by
the rain in their tents at the market and when they see relatively warm covered
Jewish kiosks with bread and sausage they are not happy. These phenomena are
catastrophic and must be considered There is a terrible disproportion in the
government structure, in daily life and in other areas We have a housing crisis
in Moscow masses of people are crowding into areas not fit for habitation and
at the same time people see others pouring in from other parts of the country
taking up housing. These arrivals are Jews. A national dissatisfaction is rising
and a defensiveness and fear of other nationalities. We must not close our eyes
to that. A Russian speaking to a Russian will say things that he will not say to a
Jew. Many are saying that there are too many Jews in Moscow. This must be
dealt with, but dont call it anti-Semitism.2147
But Larin regarded Klyutchnikovs speech as a manifestation of anti-
Semitism, saying this speech serves as an example of the good nature of Soviet
power in its battle against anti-Semitism because Klyutchnikov was roundly
criticized by speakers who followed at the same meeting, but no administrative
measures were taken against him.2148 (Here it is, the frustration of the
communist activist!) Agursky writes: one would expect repression to swiftly
follow for such a speech in the 20s and 30s, but Klyutchnikov got off. Maybe
he received secret support from some quarters? 2149 (But why look for secret
causes? It would have been too much of a scandal to punish such a famous
publicist, who just returned from abroad and could have harmed a reverse
migration that was so important for Soviet authorities [Translators note:
2146. , . 86.
2147. *, . 124-125 ( ,
7 . 1926).
2148 , . 127.
2149. . -, . 223.
reverse migration return of people who emigrated from Russia during
previous period of revolutions and Civil War].)
The 20s were spoken of as the conquest by the Jews of Russian capital
cities and industrial centers where conditions were better. As well, there was a
migration to the better areas within the cities. G. Fedotov describes Moscow at
that time: The revolution deformed its soul, turning it inside out, emptying out
its mansions, and filling them with a foreign and alien people. 2150 A Jewish
joke from the era: Even from Berdichev and even the very old come to
Moscow: they want to die in a Jewish city.2151
In a private letter V.I. Vernadsky [Translators note: a prominent Russian
polymath] in 1927 writes: Moscow now is like Berdichev; the power of Jewry
is enormous and anti-Semitism (including in communist circles) is growing
unabated.2152
Larin: We do not hide figures that demonstrate growth of the Jewish
population in urban centers, it is completely unavoidable and will continue into
the future. He forecasted the migration from Ukraine and Byelorussia of an
additional 600,000 Jews. We cant look upon this as something shameful, that
the party would silence we must create a spirit in the working class so that
anyone who gives a speech against the arrival of Jews in Moscow would be
considered a counter-revolutionary.2153
And for counter-revolutionaries there is nine grams of lead2154 that much
is clear.
But, what to do about anti-Semitic tendencies even in our party circles
was a concern in the upper levels of the party.
According to official data reported in Pravda in 1922, Jews made up 5.2%
of the party.2155 M. Agursky: But their actual influence was considerably more.
In that same year at the 11th Communist Party Congress Jews made up 14.6%
of the voting delegates, 18.3% of the non-voting delegates and 26% of those
elected to the Central Committee at the conference.2156 (Sometimes one
accidentally comes upon such data: a taciturn memoirist from Moscow
opens Pravda in July, 1930 and notes: The portrait of the 25-member
Presidium of the Communist Party included 11 Russians, 8 Jews, 3 from the
Caucasus, and 3 Latvians.2157) In the large cities, close to areas of the former
Pale of Settlement, the following data: In the early 20s party organizations in
Minsk, Gomel and Vitebsk in 1922 were, respectively, 35.8%, 21.1%, and
2150.. . : . (1918-1931). : YMCA-Press, 1967, , 57.
2151. . : . : ,
1929, . 50.
2152 .. .. 14 1927 // , 1989,
12, . 219.
2153. , . 61-63, 86.
2154 , . 259.
2155E.. // , 1923, 21 , . 5.
2156. . -, . 264.
2157.. . ( 1928 1931). :
YMCA-Press, 1991, . 202.
16.6% Jewish, respectively.2158 Larin notes: Jewish revolutionaries play a
bigger part than any others in revolutionary activity thanks to their qualities,
Jewish workers often find it easier to rise to positions of local leadership.2159
In the same issue of Pravda, it is noted that Jews at 5.2% of the Party were
in the third place after Russians (72%) and Ukrainians (5.9%), followed by
Latvians (2.5%) and then Georgians, Tatars, Poles and Byelorussians. Jews had
the highest rate of per capita party membership 7.2% of Jews were in the party
versus 3.8% for Great Russians.2160
M. Agursky correctly notes that in absolute numbers the majority of
communists were, of course, Russians, but the unusual role of Jews in
leadership was dawning on the Russians.2161 It was just too obvious.
For instance, Zinoviev gathered many Jews around himself in the
Petersburg leadership. (Agursky suggests this was what Larin was referring to
in his discussion of the photograph of the Presidium of Petrograd Soviet in 1918
in his book2162). By 1921 the preponderance of Jews in Petrograd CP
organization was apparently so odious that the Politburo, reflecting on the
lessons of Kronshtadt and the anti-Semitic mood of Petrograd, decided to send
several ethnic Russian communists to Petrograd, though entirely for publicity
purposes. So Uglanov took the place of Zorin-Homberg as head of Gubkom;
Komarov replaced Trilisser and Semyonov went to the Cheka. But Zinoviev
objected to the decision of Politboro and fought the new group and as a
result Uglanov was recalled from Petrograd and a purely Russian opposition
group formed spontaneously in the Petrograd organization, a group, forced to
counter the rest of the organization whose tone was set by Jews.2163
But not only in Petrograd at the 12th Communist Party Congress (1923)
three out of six Politburo members were Jewish. Three out of seven were Jews
in the leadership of the Komsomol and in the Presidium of the all-Russia
Conference in 1922.2164 This was not tolerable to other leading communists and,
apparently, preparations were begun for an anti-Jewish revolt at the 13th Party
Congress (May 1924).There is evidence that a group of members of CK was
planning to drive leading Jews from the Politburo, replacing them with Nogin,
Troyanovsky and others and that only the death of Nogin interrupted the plot.
His death, literally on the eve of the Congress, resulted from an unsuccessful
and unnecessary operation for a stomach ulcer by the same surgeon who
dispatched Frunze with an equally unneeded operation a year and a half
later.2165

2158 // , 1923, 1 ( 164).

2159. , . 257, 268.
2160.. // , 1923, 21 , . 5.
2161. . -, . 303.
2162. , . 258.
2163. . -, . 238-239.
2164, 1922, 17 , . 4.
2165: 1903 1916 .
/ . .. , .
 The Cheka-GPU had second place in terms of real power after the Party. A
researcher of archival material, whom we quoted in Chapter 16, reports
interesting statistics on the composition of the Cheka in 1920, 1922, 1923,
1924, 1925 and 1927.2166 He concludes that the proportion of national minorities
in the apparatus gradually fell towards the mid-20s. In the OGPU as a whole,
the proportion of personnel from a national minority fell to 30-35% and to 40-
45% for those in leadership. (These figures contrast with 50% and 70%
respectively during the Red Terror.) However, we observe a decline in the
percentage of Latvians and an increase in the percentage of Jews. The 20s was
a period of significant influx of Jewish cadres into the organs of the OGPU.
The author explains this: Jews strived to utilize capabilities not needed in the
pre-revolutionary period. With the increasing professionalism and need for
organization, Jews, better than others, were able to meet the needs of OGPU
and the new conditions. For example, three of Dzerzhinskys four assistants
were Jews G. Yagoda, V.L. Gerson, and M.M. Lutsky.2167
In the 20s and 30s, the leading Chekists circled over the land like birds of
prey flying quickly from cliff to cliff. From the top ranks of the Central Asian
GPU off to Byelorussia and from Western Siberia to the North Caucasus, from
Kharkov to Orenburg and from Orel to Vinnitza there was a perpetual
whirlwind of movement and change. And the lonely voices of those surviving
witnesses could only speak much later, without precise reference to time, of the
executioners whose names flashed by them. The personnel, the deeds and the
power of the Cheka were completely secret.
For the 10th anniversary of the glorious Cheka we read in a newspaper a
formal order signed by the omnipresent Unshlicht (from 1921 deputy head of
Cheka, from 1923 member of Revvoensovet, from 1925 Deputy Narkom of
the Navy2168). In it, Yagoda was rewarded for particularly valuable service
for sacrifice in the battle with counter revolution; also given awards were M.
Trilisser (distinguished for his devotion to the revolution and untiring
persecution of its enemies) as well as 32 Chekists who had not been before the
public until then. Each of them with the flick of a finger could destroy anyone
of us! Among them were Jakov Agranov (for the work on all important political
trials and in the future he will orchestrate the trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, the
Industrial Party Trial, and others2169), Zinovy Katznelson, Matvey Berman
(transferred from Central Asia to the Far East) and Lev Belsky (transferred from
the Far East to Central Asia).
There were several new names: Lev Zalin, Lev Meyer, Leonid Bull (dubbed
warden of Solovki), Simeon Gendin, Karl Pauker. Some were already known

A.M. . -: , 1990, . 316.

2166.. . - 20- //
: / .-. .. . ,
: , 1999, . 330-336.
2167 , . 340, 344-345.
2168, . 3, . 178.
2169, .1. . 21.
to only a few, but now the people would get to know them. In this jubilee
newspaper2170 issue we can find a large image of slick Menzhinsky with his
faithful deputy Yagoda and a photograph of Trilisser. Shortly afterward, another
twenty Chekists were awarded with the order of the Red Banner, and again we
see a motley company of Russians, Latvians, and Jews, the latter in the same
proportions around one-third.
Some of them were avoiding publicity. Simeon Schwartz was director of
the Ukrainian Cheka. A colleague of his, Yevsei Shirvindt directed the transport
of prisoners and convoys throughout the USSR. Naturally, such Chekists as
Grimmeril Heifetz (a spy from the end of the Civil War to the end of WWII) and
Sergei Spigelglas (a Chekist from 1917 who, through his work as a spy, rose to
become director of the Foreign Department of the NKVD and a two-time
recipient of the honorary title of distinguished chekist) worked out of the
public eye. Careers of others, like Albert Stromin-Stroyev, were less impressive
(he conducted interrogations of scientists during the Academy trial in 1929-
312171).
David Azbel remembers the Nakhamkins, a family of Hasidic Jews from
Gomel. (Azbel himself was imprisoned because of snitching by the younger
family member, Lev.) The revolution threw the Nakhamkins onto the crest of a
wave. They thirsted for the revenge on everyone aristocrats, the wealthy,
Russians, few were left out. This was their path to self-realization. It was no
accident that fate led the offspring of this glorious clan to the Cheka, GPU,
NKVD and the prosecutors office. To fulfill their plans, the Bolsheviks needed
rabid people and this is what they got with the Nakhamkins. One member of
this family, Roginsky, achieved brilliant heights as Deputy Prosecutor for the
USSR but during the Stalinist purges was imprisoned, as were many, and
became a cheap stool pigeon the others were not so well known. They
changed their last name to one more familiar to the Russian ear and occupied
high places in the Organs.2172
Unshlict did not change his name to one more familiar to the Russian ear.
See, this Slavic brother became truly a father of Russians: a warplane built
with funds of farmer mutual aid societies (that is, on the last dabs of money
extorted from peasants) was named after him. No doubt, farmers could not even
pronounce his name and likely thought that this Pole was a Jew. Indeed, this
reminds us that the Jewish issue does not explain the devastation of revolution,
albeit it places a heavy hue on it. As it was also hued by many other
unpronounceable names from Polish Dzerzhinsky and Eismont to Latvian
Vatsetis. And what if we looked into the Latvian issue? Apart from those
soldiers who forced the dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly and
who later provided security for the Bolshevik leaders during the entire Civil

2170, 1927, 18 ., . 1, 3, 4.
2171, . 3, . 115-116, 286, 374, 394, 414.
2172. . , // ( ):
. -, 1989, 105, . 204-205.
War, we find many high-placed Latvian Bolsheviks. Gekker suppressed the
uprising in Yaroslavl Guberniya. Among others, there were Rudzutak, Eikhe,
Eikhmans from Solovki, M. Karklin, A. Kaktyn, R. Kisis, V. Knorin, A.
Skundre (one of those who suppressed the Tambov Uprising); Chekists Petere,
Latsis, and an honorary Chekist Lithuanian I. Yusis. This thread can lead
directly to 1991 (Pugo) And what if we separate Ukrainians from Russians
(as demanded by the Ukrainians these days)? We will find dozens of them at the
highest posts of Bolshevik hierarchy, from its conception to the very end.
No, power was not Jewish power then. Political power was
internationalist and its ranks were to the large extent Russian. But under its
multi-hued internationalism it united in an anti-Russian front against a Russian
state and Russian traditions.
In view of the anti-Russian orientation of power and the multinational
makeup of the executioners, why, in Ukraine, Central Asia and the Baltics did
the people think it was Russians who had enslaved them? Because they were
alien. A destroyer from ones own nation is much closer than a destroyer from
an alien tribe. And while it is a mistake to attribute the ruin and destruction to
nationalist chauvinism, at the same time in Russia in the 20s the inevitable
question hanged in the air that was posed many year later by Leonard Schapiro:
why was it highly likely that anyone unfortunate enough to fall into the hands
of the Cheka would go before a Jewish interrogator or be shot by a Jew.2173?
Yet the majority of modern writers fail to even acknowledge these
questions. Often Jewish authors thoughtlessly and meticulously comply and
publish vast lists of Jewish leadership of the time. For example, see how
proudly the article Jews in Kremlin,2174 published in journal Alef, provides a
list of the highest Soviet officials Jews for 1925. It listed eight out of twelve
directors of Gosbank. The same level of Jewish representation was found
among top trade union leaders. And it comments: We do not fear accusations.
Quite opposite it is active Jewish participation in governing the state that
helps to understand why state affairs were better then than now, when Jews at
top positions are as rare as hens teeth. Unbelievably, that was written in 1989.
Regarding the army, one Israeli scholar2175 painstakingly researched and
proudly published a long list of Jewish commanders of the Red Army, during
and after the Civil War. Another Israeli researcher published statistics obtained
from the 1926 census to the effect that while Jews made up 1.7% of the male
population in the USSR, they comprised 2.1% of the combat officers, 4.4% of
the command staff, 10.3% of the political leadership and 18.6% of military
doctors.2176

2173Leonard Schapiro. The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement // The
Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 40, London: Athlone Press, 1961-62, p. 165.
2174. . // , -, 1989, ( 263), . 24-28.
2175 . :
. 2- . -, 1982. . 1.
2176 . : (1933-1945). ,
1990, . 96.
 And what did the West see? If the government apparatus could operate in
secret under the communist party, which maintained its conspiratorial secrecy
even after coming to power, diplomats were on view everywhere in the world.
At the first diplomatic conferences with Soviets in Geneva and the Hague in
1922, Europe could not help but notice that Soviet delegations and their staff
were mostly Jewish.2177 Due to the injustice of history, a long and successful
career of Boris Yefimovich Stern is now completely forgotten (he wasnt even
mentioned in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (GSE) of 1971). Yet he was the
second most important assistant to Chicherin during Genoa Conference, and
later at Hague Conference, and still later he led Soviet delegation during
longstanding demilitarization negotiations. He was also a member of Soviet
delegation at League of Nations. Stern was ambassador in Italy and Finland and
conducted delicate negotiations with the Finns before the Soviet-Finnish war.
Finally, from 1946 to 1948 he was the head of the Soviet delegation at UN. And
he used to be a longstanding lecturer at the High Diplomatic School (at one
point during anti-cosmopolitan purges he was fired but in 1953 he was
restored at that position).
An associate of Chicherin, Leon Haikis worked for many years in the
Narkomat of the Foreign Affairs (NKID). In 1937 he was sent to a warmer place
as ambassador to the embattled Republican government of Spain (where he
directed the Republican side during the Civil War), but was arrested and
removed. Fyodor Rotshtein founded the communist party in Great Britain in
1920 and in that very year he was a member of the Soviet delegation in
negotiations with England! Two years later he represented RSFSR at the Hague
conference.2178 (As Litvinovs right hand man he independently negotiated with
ambassadors to Russia in important matters; until 1930 he was in the Presidium
of NKID and for 30 years before his death, a professor at the Moscow State
University.)
And on the other side of the globe, in southern China, M. Gruzenberg-
Borodin had served for 5 years when the December 1927 Canton Rebellion
against the Kuomintang broke out. It is now recognized that the revolt was
prepared by our Vice Consul, Abram Hassis, who, at age of 33 was killed by
Chinese soldiers. Izvestia ran several articles with the obituaries and the
photographs of comrades in arms under Kuibishev, comparing the fallen
comrade with highly distinguished communists like Furmanov and Frunze.2179
In 1922 Gorky told the academic Ipatiev that 98% of the Soviet trade
mission in Berlin was Jewish2180 and this probably was not much of an
exaggeration. A similar picture would be found in other Western capitals where
the Soviets were ensconced. The work that was performed in early Soviet

2177 , , .: .. . :
( ). , 1923, . 148.
2178, . 2, . 499-500, . 3, . 273, 422.
2179, 1927, 22 , . 1.
2180Vladimir N. Ipatieff. The Life of a Chemist. Stanford, 1946, p. 377.
trade missions is colorfully described in a book by G.A. Solomon, 2181 the first
Soviet trade representative in Tallinn, Estonia the first European capital to
recognize the Bolsheviks. There are simply no words to describe the boundless
theft by the early Bolsheviks in Russia (along with covert actions against the
West) and the corruption of soul these activities brought to their effecters.
Shortly after Gorkys conversation with Ipatiev he was criticized in the
Soviet press for an article where he reproached the Soviet government for its
placement of so many Jews in positions of responsibility in government and
industry. He had nothing against Jews per se, but, departing from views he
expressed in 1918, he thought that Russians should be in charge.2182
And Pravdas twin publication Dar Amos (Pravda in Yiddish) objected
strongly: Do they (i.e. Gorky and Shalom Ash, the interviewer) really want for
Jews to refuse to serve in any government position? For them to get out of the
way? That kind of decision could only be made by counter-revolutionaries or
cowards.2183
In Jews in the Kremlin, the author, using the 1925 Annual Report of NKID,
introduces leading figures and positions in the central apparatus. In the
publishing arm there is not one non-Jew and further, with evident pride, the
author examines the staff in the Soviet consulates around the world and finds
there is not one country in the world where the Kremlin has not placed a trusted
Jew.2184
If he was interested, the author of Alef could find no small number of Jews
in the Supreme Court of RSFSR of 1920s,2185 in the Procurators office and
RKI. Here we can find already familiar A. Goikhbarg, who, after chairing the
Lesser Sovnarcom, worked out the legal system for the NEP era, supervised
development of Civil Code of RSFSR and was director of the Institute of Soviet
Law.2186
It is much harder to examine lower, provincial level authorities, and not
only because of their lower exposure to the press but also due to their rapid
fluidity, and frequent turnover of cadres from post to post, from region to
region. This amazing early Soviet shuffling of personnel might have been
caused either by an acute deficit of reliable men as in in the Lenins era or by
mistrust (and the tearing of a functionary from the developed connections) in
Stalins times.
Here are several such career trajectories.
Lev Maryasin was Secretary of Gubkom of Orel Guberniya, later chair of
Sovnarkhoz of Tatar Republic, later head of a department of CK of Ukraine,
later chair of board of directors of Gosbank of USSR, and later Deputy
Narkom of Finances of USSR. Moris Belotsky was head of Politotdel of the
2181.. . . : , 1930. 4.2.
2182Vladimir N. Ipatieff. The Life of a Chemist, p. 377.
2183 *, 1922, 6 ( 130), . 6.
2184. . // , 1989, , . 26-27.
2185Izvestia. 1927, 25 aot, p. 2.
2186, . 1, . 331.
First Cavalry Army (a very powerful position), participated in suppression of
the Kronshtadt Uprising, later in NKID, then later the First Secretary of
North Ossetian Obkom, and even later was First Secretary of CK of Kyrgyzstan.
A versatile functionary Grigory Kaminsky was Secretary of Gubkom of
Tula Guberniya, later Secretary of CK of Azerbaijan, later chair of
Kolkhozcenter, and later Narkom of Health Care Service.
Abram Kamensky was Narkom of State Control Commission of Donetsk-
Krivoy Rog Republic, later Deputy Narkom of Nationalities of RSFSR, later
Secretary of Gubkom of Donetsk, later served in Narkomat of Agriculture, then
director of Industrial Academy, and still later he served in the Narkomat of
Finances.2187
There were many Jewish leaders of the Komsomol.
Ascendant career of Efim Tzetlin began with the post of the First Chairman
of CK RKSM (fall of 1918); after the Civil War he become Secretary of CK and
Moscow Committee of RKSM, since 1922 a member of executive committee
of KIM (Young Communist International), in 1923-24 a spy in Germany, later
he worked in Secretariat of Executive Committee of Communist International,
still later in editorial office of Pravda, and even later he was head of
Bukharins secretariat, where this latter post eventually proved fatal for him.2188
The career of Isaiah Khurgin was truly amazing. In 1917 he was a member
of Ukrainian Rada [Parliament], served both in the Central and the Lesser
chambers and worked on the draft of legislation on Jewish autonomy in
Ukraine. Since 1920 we see him as a member VKPb, in 1921 he was the
Trade Commissioner of Ukraine in Poland, in 1923 he represented German-
American Transport Society in USA, serving as a de facto Soviet
plenipotentiary. He founded and chaired Amtorg (American Trading
Corporation). His future seemed incredibly bright but alas at the age of 38 (in
1925) he was drowned in a lake in USA.2189 What a life he had!
Lets glance at the economy. Moses Rukhimovitch was Deputy Chair of
Supreme Soviet of the National Economy. Ruvim Levin was a member of
Presidium of Gosplan (Ministry of Economic Planning) of USSR and Chair of
Gosplan of RSFSR (later Deputy Narkom of Finances of USSR). Zakhary
Katzenelenbaum was inventor of the governmental Loan for Industrialization
in 1927 (and, therefore, of all subsequent loans). He also was one of the
founders of Soviet Gosbank. Moses Frumkin was Deputy Narkom of Foreign
Trade from 1922 but in fact he was in charge of the entire Narkomat. He and A.
I. Vainstein were long-serving members of the panel of Narkomat of Finances of
USSR. Vladimirov-Sheinfinkel was Narkom of Provand of Ukraine, later
Narkom of Agriculture of Ukraine, and even later he served as Narkom of
Finances of RSFSR and Deputy Narkom of Finances of USSR.2190

2187 , . 105, 536, 538, . 2, . 256.

2188. . 3, . 311-312.
2189, . 3, . 302.
2190, . 1, . 197-198, 234, 275-276, . 2, . 18, 140 518 . 3, . 260.
 If you are building a mill, you are responsible for possible flood. A
newspaper article by Z. Zangvil describes celebratory jubilee meeting of the
Gosbank board of directors in 1927 (five years after introduction of chervonets
[a former currency of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union] and explains the
importance of chervonets and displays a group photograph. The article lauds
Sheinman, the chairman of the board, and Katzenelenbaum, a member of the
board.2191 Sheinmans signature was reproduced on every Soviet chervonets and
he simultaneously held the post of Narkom of Domestic Commerce (from
1924). And hold your breath, my reader! He didnt return from a foreign visit
in 1929!2192 He preferred to live in bloody capitalism!
Speaking of mid-level Soviet institutions, the well-known economist and
professor B. D. Brutskus asks: Did not the revolution open up new
opportunities for the Jewish population? Among these opportunities would be
government service. more than anything it is obvious the large numbers of
Jews in government, particularly in higher posts, and most of the Jewish
government employees come from the higher classes not the Jewish masses.
But, upperclass Jews, required to serve the Soviet government did not gain, but
lost in comparison with what they would have had in their own businesses or
freely pursuing professions. As well, those who moved through the Soviet
hierarchy had to display the utmost of tact to avoid arousing jealousy and
dissatisfaction. A large number of Jewish public servants, regardless of talent
and qualities, would not lessen anti-Semitism, but would strengthen it among
other workers and among the intelligentsia. He maintained there are many
Jewish public servants particularly in the commissariats devoted to economic
functions.2193
Larin put it more simply: the Jewish intelligentsia in large numbers served
the victorious revolution readily realizing access to previously denied
government service.2194
G. Pomerantz, speaking 50 years later justified this: history dragged Jews
into the government apparatus, Jews had nowhere else to go besides to
government institutions, including the Cheka2195 as we commented earlier. The
Bolsheviks also had no other place to go the Jewish Tribune from Paris
explains there were so many Jews in various Soviet functions because of the
need for literate, sober bureaucrats.2196
However one can read in Jewish World, a Parisian publication, that: there
is no denying that a large percentage of Jewish youth from lower social
elements some completely hopeless failures, were drawn to Bolshevism by

2191, 1927, 27 , . 4.
2192, . 3, . 383.
2193. . //
, , 1928, . 36, . 519-521.
2194. , . 73.
2195. . // : , ,
. , 1980, 6, . 52-53, 68.
2196. . // , 1924, 1 ( 58), . 3.
the sudden prospect of power; for others it was the world proletarian
revolution and for still others it was a mixture of adventurous idealism and
practical utilitarianism.2197
Of course not all were drawn to Bolshevism. There were large numbers
of peaceful Jews whom the revolution crushed. However, the life in the towns
of the former Pale of Settlement was not visible to ordinary non-Jewish person.
Instead the average person saw, as described by M. Heifetz, arrogant, self-
confident and self-satisfied adult Jews at ease on red holidays and red
weddings We now sit where Tsars and generals once sat, and they sit
beneath us.2198
These were not unwaveringly ideological Bolsheviks. The invitation to
power was extended to millions of residents from rotting shtetls, to pawn
brokers, tavern owners, contrabandists, seltzer water salesmen and those who
sharpened their wills in the fight for survival and their minds in evening study
of the Torah and the Talmud. The authorities invited them to Moscow, Petrograd
and Kiev to take into their quick nervous hands that which was falling from the
soft, pampered hands of the hereditary intelligentsia everything from the
finances of a great power, nuclear physics and the secret police.
They couldnt resist the temptation of Esau, the less so since, in addition to
a bowl of potage, they were offered the chance to build the promised land, that
is, communism.2199 There was a Jewish illusion that this was their
country.2200
Many Jews did not enter the whirlwind of revolution and didnt
automatically join the Bolsheviks, but the general national inclination was one
of sympathy for the Bolshevik cause and a feeling that life would now be
incomparably better. The majority of Jews met the revolution, not with fear,
but with welcome arms.2201 In the early 20s the Jews of Byelorussia and
Ukraine were a significant source of support for the centralization of power in
Moscow over and against the influence of regional power.2202 Evidence of
Jewish attitudes in 1923 showed the overwhelming majority considered
Bolshevism to be a lesser evil and that if the Bolsheviks lost power it would be
worse for them.2203
Now, a Jew can command an army! These gifts alone were enough to
bring Jewish support for the communists The disorder of the Bolshevism
2197. . // : 1939.
( -1). : - , . 47.
2198 . ( ). : , 1978, .
43.
2199 , . 44-45.
2200. . // 22: -
. -, 1980,
16, . 174.
2201R. Rutman. Solzhenitsyn and the Jewish Question // Soviet Jewish Affairs, 1974, Vol. 4,
2, p. 7.
2202. . -, . 150.
2203 ! // , . 7.
seemed like a brilliant victory for justice and no one noticed the complete
suppression of freedom.2204 Large number of Jews who did not leave after the
revolution failed to foresee the bloodthirstiness of the new government, though
the persecution, even of socialists, was well underway. The Soviet government
was as unjust and cruel then as it was to be in 37 and in 1950. But in the 20s it
did not raise alarm or resistance in the wider Jewish population since its force
was aimed not at Jewry.

When Leskov, in a report for the Palensky Commission [Translators note: a

pre-revolution government commission], one by one refuted all the presumed
consequences for Russians from the removal of restrictions on Jewish
settlement in Russia he couldnt have foreseen the great degree to which Jews
would be participating in governing the country and the economy in the 20s.
The revolution changed the entire course of events and we dont know how
things would have developed without it.
When in 1920, Solomon Luria [Translators note: aka Lurie], a professor
of ancient history in Petrograd, found that in Soviet, internationalist and
communist Russia anti-Semitism was again on the rise, he was not surprised.
On the contrary, events substantiated the correctness of [his] earlier
conclusions that the cause of anti-Semitism lies with the Jews themselves
and currently with or in spite of the complete absence of legal restrictions on
Jews, anti-Semitism has erupted with a new strength and reached a pitch that
could never have been imagined in the old regime.2205
Russian (more precisely Little Russian) anti-Semitism of past centuries and
the early 20th century was blown away with its seeds by the winds of the
October revolution. Those who joined the Union of the Russian People, those
who marched with their religious standards to smash Jewish shops, those who
demanded the execution of Beilis, those who defended the royal throne, the
urban middle class and those who were with them or who resembled them or
who were suspected to be like them were rounded up by the thousands and shot
or imprisoned.
Among Russian workers and peasants there was no anti-Semitism before
the revolution this is attested to by leaders of the revolution themselves. The
Russian intelligentsia was actively sympathetic to the cause of the oppressed
Jews and children of the post-revolution years were raised only in the
internationalist spirit.
Stripped of any strength, discredited and crushed completely, where did
anti-Semitism come from?

2204.. . : , ,
. , 1939, . 70.
2205.. . . -: , 1976, . 8 [1- .
.: , 1922].
 We already described how surprising it was for Jewish-Russian migrs to
learn that anti-Semitism had not died. They followed the phenomenon in
writings of socialists E.D. Kuskova and S.S. Maslov, who came from Russia in
1922.
In an article in the Jewish Tribune, Kuskova states that anti-Semitism in the
USSR is not a figment of the imagination and that in Russia, Bolshevism is
now blending with Judaism this cannot be doubted. She even met highly
cultured Jews who were anti-Semites of the new Soviet type. A Jewish doctor
told her: Jewish Bolshevik administrators ruined the excellent relations he had
with the local population. A teacher said children tell me that I teach in a
Jewish school because we have forbidden the teaching of The Ten
Commandments and driven off the priest. There are only Jews in the
Narkomat of Education. In high school circles (from radical families) there is
talk about the predominance of the Jews. Young people, in general are more
anti-Semitic than the older generation and one hears everywhere they
showed their true colors and tortured us. Russian life is full of this stuff
today. But if you ask me who they are, these anti-Semites, they are most of the
society. So widespread is this thinking that the political administration
distributed a proclamation explaining why there are so many Jews in it: When
the Russian proletariat needed its own new intelligentsia, mid-level
intelligentsia, technical workers and administrative workers, not surprisingly,
Jews, who, before had been in the opposition, came forward to meet them the
occupation by Jews of administrative posts in the new Russia is historically
inevitable and would have been the natural outcome, regardless of whether the
new Russia had become KD (Constitutional Democrat), SR (Socialist
Revolutionary) or proletarian. Any problems with having Aaron Moiseevich
Tankelevich sitting in the place of Ivan Petrovich Ivanov need to be cured.
Kuskova parries in a Constitutional Democratic or SR Russia many
administrative posts would have been occupied by Jews. but neither the
Kadets nor SRs would have forbidden teaching the Ten Commandments and
wouldnt have chopped off heads Stop Tankelevich from doing evil and there
will be no microbe of anti-Semitism.2206
The Jewish migr community was chilled by Maslovs findings. Here was
a tested SR with an unassailable reputation who lived through the first four
years of Soviet power. Judeophobia is everywhere in Russia today. It has swept
areas where Jews were never before seen and where the Jewish question never
occurred to anyone. The same hatred for Jews is found in Vologda, Archangel,
in the towns of Siberia and the Urals.2207 He recounts several episodes affecting
the perception of the simple Russian peasants such as the Tyumen Produce
Commissar Indenbaums order to shear sheep for the second time in the season,

2206. . ? // , 1922, 19 ( 144), . 1-

2.
2207.. . . : , 1922. .
2, . 41.
because the Republic needs wool. (This was prior to collectivization, no less;
these actions of this commissar caused the Ishim peasant uprising.) The
problem arose because it was late in the fall and the sheep would die without
their coats from the coming winter cold. Maslov does not name the commissars
who ordered the planting of millet and fried sun-flower seeds or issued a
prohibition on planting malt, but one can conclude they did not come from
ordinary Russian folk or from the Russian aristocracy or from yesterdays
men. From all this, the peasantry could only conclude that the power over them
was Jewish. So too did the workers. Several workers resolutions from the
Urals in Feb and March of 1921 sent to the Kremlin complained with outrage
of the dominance of the Jews in central and local government. The
intelligentsia, of course does not think that Soviet power is Jewish, but it has
noted the vastly disproportionate role of Jews in authority when compared to
their numbers in the population.
And if a Jew approaches a group of non-Jews who are freely discussing
Soviet reality, they almost always change the topic of conversation even if the
new arrival is a personal acquaintance.2208
Maslov tries to understand the cause of the widespread and bitter hatred of
Jews in modern Russia and it seems to him to be the identification throughout
society of Soviet power and Jewish power.
The expression Yid Power is often used in Russia and particularly in
Ukraine and in the former Pale of Settlement not as a polemic, but as a
completely objective definition of power, its content and its politics. Soviet
power in the first place answers the wishes and interests of Jews and they are its
ardent supporters and in the second place, power resides in Jewish hands.
Among the causes of Judeophobia Maslov notes the tightly welded ethnic
cohesion they have formed as a result of their difficult thousands year old
history. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to selecting staff at
institutions if the selection process is in the hands of Jews, you can bet that
the entire staff of responsible positions will go to Jews, even if it means
removing the existing staff. And often that preference for their own is
displayed in a sharp, discourteous manner which is offensive to others. In the
Jewish bureaucrat, Soviet power manifests more obviously its negative
features the intoxicating wine of power is stronger for Jews and goes to their
head I dont know where this comes from, perhaps because of the low
cultural level of the former pharmacists and shopkeepers. Maybe from living
earlier without full civil rights?.2209
The Parisian Zionist journal Sunrise wrote in 1922 that Gorky essentially
said that the growth of anti-Semitism is aided by the tactless behavior of the
Jewish Bolsheviks themselves in many situations.
That is the blessed truth!

2208 , . 41,42,43, 155, 176-177.

2209 , . 42,44-45.
 And Gorky wasnt speaking of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev he was
speaking of the typical Jewish communist who occupies a position in the
collegia, presidia and petty and mid-level Soviet institutions where he comes
into contact with large swaths of the population. Such individuals occupy
leading front-line positions which naturally multiplies their number in the mind
of the public.2210
D. Pasmanik comments: we must admit that many Jews through their own
actions provoke acute anti-Semitism all the impudent Jews filling the
communist ranks these pharmacists, shopkeepers, peddlers, dropouts and
pseudo intellectuals are indeed causing much evil to Russia and Jewry.2211
Hardly ever before inside of Russia or outside of Russia have Jews been
the subject of such an active and concentrated hostility it has never reached
such an intensity nor been so widespread. This elemental hostility has been fed
by the open and undeniable participation of Jews in destructive processes
underway in Europe as well as by the tales and exaggerations about such
participation.2212 A terrible anti-Semitic mood is taking hold, fed exclusively
by Bolshevism which continues to be identified with Jewry.2213
In 1927 Mikhail Kozakov (shot in 1930 after the food workers trial)
wrote in a private letter to his brother overseas about the Judeophobic mood of
the masses (among non-party and party members) it is no secret that the mass
of workers do not love the Jews.2214
And Shulgin, after his secret trip to the USSR in 1928 says: No one says
anymore that anti-Semitism is propaganda planted by the Tsars government
or an infection limited to the dregs of society Geographically it spreads
wider each day threatening to engulf all of Russia. The main center today seems
to be Moscow anti-Semitism is a new phenomenon in Great Russia, but is
much more serious than old anti-Semitism in the South (anti-Semitism of the
South of Russia was traditionally humorous and mitigated by anecdotes about
Jews2215).
Larin brings up an anti-Jewish slogan allegedly used for propaganda
purposes by the White Guards Russians are sent to Narym [Translators
note: a locale in the far north] and Jews to the Crimea [Translators note: a
vacation spot].2216
The Soviet authorities eventually became seriously concerned with the rise
of anti-Semitism. In 1923 the Jewish Tribunewrites, albeit with skepticism, the

2210.. . *, . 198-199.
2211.. . , . 198, 200.
2212.. . // , . 101.
2213.. . ? // , . 217.
2214. . [] // - (). . 1, -60, .
1.
2215.. . : . ,
1929, . 41-43.
2216. , . 254.
Commissariat of Internal Affairs has established a commission to study the
question of protecting the Jews from dark forces .2217
In 1926 Kalinin (and other functionaries) received many questions about
Jews in letters and at meetings. As a result, Larin undertook a study of the
problem in a book Jews and anti-Semitism in the USSR. From his own reports,
queries and interviews (taken, we can presume, from communists or communist
sympathizers) he enumerates 66 questions from those the authorities received,
recording them without editing the language. Among these questions:2218
Where are the Jews in Moscow coming from?
Why is authority predominantly Jewish?
How come Jews dont wait in line?
How do Jews arriving from Berdichev and other cities immediately receive
apartments? (There is a joke that the last Jew left Berdichev and gave the keys
to the city to Kalinin.)
Why do Jews have money and own their own bakeries, etc?
Why are Jews drawn to light work and not to physical labor?
Why do Jews in government service and in professions stick together and
help each other while Russians do not?
They do not want to work at everyday jobs, but are concerned only with
their careers.
Why do they not farm even though it is now allowed them?
Why are Jews given good land in the Crimea while Russians are given
inferior land?
Why is party opposition 76% Jewish? [Translators note: the opposition
to the general line of the party within the party itself]
Why did anti-Semitism develop only against Jews and not against other
nationalities?
What should a group agitprop leader do when he tries to counter anti-
Semitic tendencies in his group and no one supports him?
Larin suspects that these questions were dreamed up and spread among the
masses by an underground organization of counter-revolutionaries!2219 As we
will see later, this is where some official explanations came from. But he fixates
on the unexpected phenomenon and tries to address scientifically the question
How could anti-Semitism take hold in the USSR in those strata of society
[factory workers, students], where, before the revolution, it was little noted? 2220
His findings were:
Anti-Semitism among the intelligentsia.
Among the intelligentsia anti-Semitism is more developed than in any
other group. However, he maintains that dissatisfaction rises not from the

2217. . //
, 1923, 7 . ( 170), . 3.
2218. , . 240-244.
2219. , . 244.
2220 , . 47.
large number of Jews, but from the fact that Jews presumed to enter into
competition with the Russian intelligentsia for government jobs.
The obvious development of anti-Semitic attitudes among city clerks and
workers by 1928 cannot be explained by excessive numbers of Jews claiming
jobs. Among the intellectual professions, anti-Semitic tendencies are felt in
the medical sphere and in engineering The army has good political training
and there is no anti-Semitism there, even though the command staff of the Red
Army has a significantly higher percentage of Jews than are present in the
country as a whole.2221
Anti-Semitism among the urban bourgeoisie.
The root of anti-Semitism is found in urban bourgeois philistinism. But,
the battle against anti-Semitism among the bourgeoisieit is mixed in with
the question of the destruction of the bourgeoisie in general The anti-
Semitism of the bourgeoisie will disappear when the bourgeoisie
disappears.2222
Anti-Semitism in the countryside.
We have almost completely pushed out the private trader of the peasants
grain, therefore among the peasant masses anti-Semitism is not showing itself
and has even weakened against its pre-war levels. Now it appears only in those
areas where Jews have been resettled on the land, allegedly from Kulaks and
former landowners.2223
Anti-Semitism among the working class.
Anti-Semitism among the workers has grown noticeably stronger in recent
years. By 1929 there could be no doubt of its existence. Now it occurs with
more frequency and intensity than a few years ago. It is particularly strong
among the backwards parts of the working class women and seasonal
workers. However, an anti-Semitic mood can be observed among a broad
spectrum of workers, not only among the corrupted fringe. And here
economic competition is not a factor it arises even where there is no such
competition; Jews make up only make only 2.7% of the working class. In the
lower level professional organizations they tried to paint over anti-Semitism.
Difficulties arise because attempts to hide anti-Semitism come from the
active proletariat itself; indeed, anti-Semitism originates from the active
proletariat. In many cases Party members and members of Komsomol
demonstrate anti-Semitism. Talk of Jewish dominance is particularly
widespread, and in meetings one hears complaints that the Soviet authority
limits itself to battle with the Orthodox religion alone.
What savagery anti-Semitism among the proletariat?!! How could this
occur in the most progressive and politically aware class in the world?! Larin
finds that it arose because no other means remained for the White Guard to
influence the masses besides anti-Semitism. Its plan of action moves along

2221 , . 35, 86, 102, 108-110, 120.

2222 , . 121, 134, 135.
2223 , . 144, 145, 148-149.
the rails of anti-Semitism.2224 This was a theory that was to have frightening
consequences.
Larins views on the anti-Semitism of the time were to find echoes later in
other authors.
S. Shwartz provides his own variant on anti-Semitism as being the result of
a vulgar perception of Jews as the main carriers of the New Economic Policy
(NEP). But he agrees: The Soviet government, not without basis, saw in anti-
Semitism a possible tool of the counter-revolution.2225
In 1968 the author adds: After the civil war, anti-Semitism began to
spread, gripping layers of society which were free of this tendency before the
revolution.2226
Against this it was necessary to engage not in academic discussion but to
act energetically and forcefully. In May, 1928 the CK of the VKPb issued an
Agitprop communication about measures to be taken in the battle with anti-
Semitism. (As was often the case in implementation of party directives, related
documents were not publicized, but circulated among party organizations.) The
battle to create an atmosphere of intolerance of anti-Semitism was to be taken
up in educational programs, public reports, lectures, the press, radio and school
textbooks and finally, authorities were to apply the strictest disciplinary
measures to those found guilty of anti-Semitic practices. 2227 Sharp newspaper
articles followed. In Pravdasarticle by a highly connected Lev Sosnovsky, he
incriminates all kinds of party and educational officials in anti-Semitism: an
official in Kiev openly fires Jews with the connivance of the local district
party committee; defamatory anti-Jewish graffiti is widespread etc. From a
newspaper article: with the growing battle against anti-Semitism there are
demands to solve the problem by increasing repression on those carriers of anti-
Semitism and on those who protect them. Clearly it was the GPU speaking
through the language of a newspaper article.2228
After Larins report, the issue of anti-Semitism was included into various
educational curricula, while Larin himself continued to research the ways to
overcome anti-Semitism decisively. Until now we were too soft allowing
propaganda to spread Locally officials often do not deal with anti-Semitism
as rigorously as they should. Newspapers should not fear to point attention to
the Jewish issue (to avoid dissemination of anti-Semitism) as it only
interferes with the fight against counter revolutionary sabotage. Anti-
Semitism is a social pathology like alcoholism or vagrancy. Too often when
dealing with communists we let them off with mere censure. If a person goes to
church and gets married, then we exclude him without discussion anti-
Semitism is no less an evil.

2224. , . 238-240, 244-245, 247, 248.

2225.. . , . 8, 39.
2226. . // -2, . 290.
2227.. . , . 83-84.
2228.. // , 1928, 17, . 4.
 As the USSR develops towards socialism, the prognosis is good that
Soviet anti-Semitism and the legacy of pre-Soviet relationships will be torn
out by the roots. Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary to impose severe
controls on intellectual anti-Semitism especially in the teaching profession and
civil service.2229
But the very spirit of the brave Twenties demands stronger language. The
nature of modern-day anti-Jewish agitation in the USSR is political and not
nationalistic. Agitation against the Jews is directed not just against Jews, but
indirectly against the Soviet power. Or maybe not so indirect: anti-Semitism
is a means of mobilization against Soviet power. And those against the
position of Soviet authorities on the Jewish question are against the working
class and for the capitalists. Any talk of Jewish dominance will be regarded
as counterrevolutionary activity against the very foundation of the nationalities
policy of the proletarian revolution Parts of the intelligentsia, and sometimes
the White Guards are using anti-Semitism to transmit bourgeois ideology.
Yes, thats it a White Guard whispering campaign, clearly there is
planned agitation by secret White Guard organizations. Behind the
philistine anti-Jewish agitation, secret monarchist organizations are leading a
battle against Soviet power And from the central organs of anti-Soviet
emigration (including Jewish bankers and Tsarist generals) an ideology is
transmitted right into our factories proving that anti-Jewish agitation in the
USSR is class-based, not nationality-based It is necessary to explain to the
masses that encouragement of anti-Jewish feelings in essence is an attempt to
lay the groundwork for counter-revolution. The masses must regard anyone who
shows sympathy to anti-Semitism as a secret counter-revolutionary or the
mouthpiece of a secret monarchist organization. (There are conspiracies
everywhere!) The term anti-Semite must take on the same meaning in the
public mind as the term counter-revolutionary .2230
The authorities had seen through everything and named everything for what
it was: counter-revolution, White Guards, monarchists, White generals and
anyone suspected of being any of the above
For the thickheaded, the revolutionary orator elaborates: The methods to
fight anti-Semitism are clear. At a minimum, to conduct open investigations
and sessions of peoples tribunal against anti-Semitism at local levels under
the motto explanations for the backward workers and repressions for the
malicious. There is no reason why Lenins decree should not apply)2231
Under Lenins decree (that from July 27, 1918) active anti-Semites were
to be placed outside of the law that is, to be shot even for agitating for a
pogrom, not just for participating in one.2232 The law encouraged each Jew to
register a complaint about any ethnic insult visited upon him.

2229. , . 9, 119-120, 269-270, 276-277, 280-282.

2230. , . 27, 45-46, 106, 116, 252, 254, 255, 257.
2231 , . 138, 283, 288.
2232 , . 259, 278.
 Now some later author will object that the July 27 Act was ultimately not
included in the law and was not part of the criminal code of 1922. Though the
criminal code of 1926 did include an article about the instigation of ethnic
hostility and dissension, there were no specific articles about acts of anti-
Semitism. This is not convincing. Article 59-7 of the Criminal Code
(propaganda or agitation intended to incite national or religious hatred or
dissension) was sufficient to send one to prison and the article provided for
confiscation of the property of perpetrators of widespread disturbances and,
under aggravated circumstances (for instance, class origin) death. Article 59-7
was based on the RSFSR Penal Code of Feb 26, 1927, which widened the
definition of instigation of national hatred making it equal in seriousness to
dissemination or preparation and storing of literature.2233
Storing books! How familiar is that proscription, contained in the related
law 58-10! [Translators note: infamous Article 58 of the Penal Code of RSFSR
dealt with so-called counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet activities.]
Many brochures on anti-Semitism were published and finally, Feb 19,
1929 Pravda devoted its lead article to the matter: Attention to the battle with
anti-Semitism .2234 A 1929 resolution of CK of Communist Party of
Byelorussia stated that counter-revolutionary nature of anti-Semitic incidents is
often ignored and that organs of justice should intensify the fight, prosecuting
both perpetrators of the law and those who inspire them.2235
The secretary of the CK of Komsomol said most dangerous in our
conditions are secret anti-Semites who hide their anti-Semitic attitudes. 2236
Those who are familiar with Soviet language understand: it is necessary to cut
off suspected ways of thinking. (This recalls Grigory Landau, speaking of
Jewish opponents: They suspect or accuse other groups around them of anti-
Semitism Anyone who voices a negative opinion about Jews is accused of
being an open anti-Semite and others are called secret anti-Semites.2237
In 1929, a certain I. Zilberman in Daily Soviet Jurisprudence (no. 4) writes
that there were too few court trials relating to anti-Semitism in Moscow
Province. In the city of Moscow alone for the year there were only 34 cases
(that is, every 10 days there was a trial for anti-Semitism somewhere in
Moscow). The Journal of Narkomyust was read as an instruction manual for
bringing such cases.
Could the most evil anti-Semite have thought up a better way to identify
Jews with Soviet power in the opinion of the people?
It went so far that in 1930 the Supreme Court of RSFSR ruled that Article
59-7 should not be used by members of national minorities seeking redress in

2233.. . , . 72-73.
2234 *, . 32.
2235.. . *, . 88-89.
2236 *, . 90-91.
2237.. . // , . 101.
conflicts of a personal nature.2238 In other words the judicial juggernaut had
already been wound up and was running at full speed.

If we look at life of regular, not commanding, Jewish folk, we see

desolation and despair in formerly vibrant and thriving shtetls. Jewish Tribune
reproduced report by a special official who inspected towns and shtetls in the
south-west of Russia in 1923, indicating that as the most active inhabitants
moved into cities, the remaining population of elders and families with many
children lived to large extent by relying on humanitarian and financial aid from
America.2239
Indeed, by the end of the period of War Communism (1918-1920) when
all trade, or any buying and selling, were prohibited under threat of property
confiscation and fines, the Jews were helped by Jewish charities like
Joint through the all-Russian Public Committee for assistance to victims of
pogroms and destitute Jews. Several other charities protected the Jewish
population later at different times, such as the SC (Society of Craftsmen, which
after the revolution moved abroad), EKOPO (the Jewish committee for
assistance to victims of war) and EKO (the Jewish colonizing society). In 1921-
22, Soviet-based Jewish charities functioned in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Despite intervention and obstacles from YevSeks (Jewish communist
organizations), Joint provided Soviet Jews with extensive financial and other
assistance, whereas SC was dedicated to establishment and development of
Jewish industry and agriculture in the south of Ukraine during first half of
1920s.2240
The first Soviet census provides insight into Jewish life during the
liberalized NEP period. Forty percent of Jews were classified as active (not
dependents). Of those, 28% were public servants, 21% craftsmen, 19%
industry workers (including apprentices), 12% merchants, 9% peasants, 1%
military men, and 10% were classified as others. Among public servants,
Jews were well represented in trade-related occupations. For instance, in
Moscow business organizations 16% of the clerks were Jews, in credit and trade
organizations 13% (30% according to the Jewish Encyclopedia)2241, in public
organizations 19%, in fiscal organizations 9%, in Sovdeps 10%, with
virtually no presence in police force. The percentages were correspondingly
higher in the former Pale of Settlement areas, up to 62% in the state trade of
Byelorussia, 44% in Ukraine (77% in category of private state servants).
The flow of Jewish workers into industry was much slower than government
wished. There were almost no Jews among railroad men and miners they rather

2238.. . *, . 73, 74.

2239 // , 1923, 21 ( 171), . 3-4.
2240, . 8, . 170,171.
2241, . 8, . 186.
preferred the professions of tailor, tanner, typographer, woodworker and food-
related specialties and other fields of consumer industry. To recruit Jewish
workers into industry, special professional schools were created with
predominantly foreign funding from Jewish organizations abroad.2242
It was the time of NEP, which improved economic conditions of Jewish
population within a new, Soviet framework.2243 In 1924 Moscow 75% of the
perfume and pharmaceutical trade was in Jewish hands, as well as 55% of the
manufactured goods trade, 49% of the jewelry trade, 39% of the small ware
trade, and 36% of the wood-depots. Starting business in a new place, a Jew
usually run down prices in private sector to attract clientele. 2244 The first and
most prominent NEPmen often were Jews. To large extent, anger against them
stemmed from the fact that they utilized the Soviet as well as the market
systems: their commerce was routinely facilitated by their links and pulls in the
Soviet apparatus. Sometimes such connections were exposed by authorities as
in the case of famous Paraffin Affair (1922). During 1920s, there were
abundant opportunities to buy up belongings of oppressed and persecuted
former people, especially high quality or rare furniture. S. Ettinger noted that
Jews made a majority of NEPmen and new-riches, 2245 which was supported by
impressive list of individuals who failed to pay state taxes and dues
in Izvestia in 1929.2246
However, at the end of NEP, authorities launched anti-capitalist assault
against financiers, merchants and manufacturers, many of whom were Jewish.
As a result, many Jews turned into Soviet trade servants and continued
working in the same spheres of finance, credit and commerce. A steamroller of
merchandise and property confiscations, outright state robbery and social
ostracizing (outclassing people into disenfranchised lishenets category) was
advancing on private commerce. Some Jewish merchants, attempting to avoid
discriminating and endlessly increasing taxation, declared themselves as having
no occupation during the census.2247 Nevertheless virtually the entire Jewish
male population in towns and shtetls passed through the torture chambers of
GPU during the campaign of gold and jewelry extortion in the beginning of
1930s.2248 Such things would be regarded as an impossible nightmare in Czars
Russia. Many Jewish families, to avoid the stigma of being lishenets, moved
into large cities. In the end, only one-fifth of Soviet Jews lived in the
traditional Jewish settlements by 1930s.2249

2242. , . 75, 77-80, 107.

2243. . // -2,
2244. * . 121-122.
2245Samuel Ettinger. Russian Society and the Jews // Bulletin on Soviet and East European
Jewish Affairs, 1970, 5, p. 38-39.
2246, 1928, 22 , . 7.
2247. . 8, . 187.
2248 , . 161.
2249 , . 188.
 Socioeconomic experiments by the Soviet authorities including all kinds
of nationalization and socialization had not only devastated the middle classes,
but also hit badly the small merchants and craftsmen. 2250 Due to general lack
of merchandise and solvent customers as well as low liquidity and exorbitant
taxes, many shtetl merchants had no other choice but to close down their shops
and while the most active left for cities, the remaining populace has nothing
else to do but aimlessly roam decrepit streets, loudly complaining about their
fate, people and God. It is apparent that Jewish masses have completely lost
their economic foundations.2251 It was really like that in many shtetls at that
time. To address the problem, even special resolution of Sovnarkom was issued
in 1929.
G. Simon, a former emigrant, came to USSR in the end of 1920s as an
American businessman with a mission to investigate shortages of Jewish
craftsmen in tools. Later, in Paris, he published a book with an emotional and
ironic title Jews Rule Over Russia. Describing the situation with Jewish
manufacturing and trade, its oppression and destruction by Soviets, he also
shares his impressions. Quoting many conversations, the general mood of
populace is pretty gloomy. Many bad things, many crimes happen in Russia
these days but its better to suppress that blinding hatred; they often fear that
the revolution will inevitably end in the Russian manner, i.e. by mass-murder of
Jews. A local Bolshevik-Jew suggests that its only the revolution that stands
between the Jews and those wishing to aggrandize Russia by the rape of Jewish
women and spilling the blood of Jewish children.2252
A well-known economist B. D. Brutskus, who in 1920 provided a damning
analysis of the socialist economy (he was expelled from the country in 1922 by
Lenin), published an extensive article Jewish population under Communist
power inContemporary Notes in 1928, chronicling the NEP in the former Pale
of Settlement areas of Ukraine and Byelorussia.
The relative importance of private enterprise was declining as even the
smallest merchants were deprived of their political rights (they became
disenfranchised lishenets and couldnt vote in Soviet elections), and, thus,
their civil rights. (In contrast, handcraftsmen still enjoyed a certain semblance
of rights.) The fight of Soviet authorities against private enterprise and
entrepreneurs is in large part a fight against Jewish populace. Because in those
days not only almost the entire private city enterprise in Ukraine and
Byelorussia was represented by Jews, but the Jewish participation in the small
capitalist upperclass in capital cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kharkov
had also became very substantial.2253
Brutskus distinguished three periods during the NEP: 1921-23, 1923-25
and 1925-27. Development of private enterprise was least impeded by
2250. . // -2, . 136.
2251 // , 1923, 21 ( 171)-. 3-4.
2252. . , . 22, 159, 192, 217, 237.
2253. . //
, 1928, . 36, . 511-512.
communists during first two and half years when Bolsheviks were still
overwhelmed by their economic debacles. The first communist reaction
followed between the end of 1923 and the spring of 1925. Wholesale and shop
trade in the former Pale of Settlement was destroyed, with only small flea
market trade still permitted. Crafts were burdened by taxation. Artisans lost
their last tools and materials (the latter often belonged to their peasant
customers) to confiscations. The concept of Jewish equality virtually turned
into fiction as two-thirds of Jews lost their voting rights.
Because YevSek (Jewish section of the communist party) inherited
specific hatred toward petty Jewish bourgeoisie cultivated by earlier Jewish
socialist parties and saw their own purpose in fighting it, its policy in the
beginning of NEP was substantially different from the general party line.
During the second part of NEP, the YevSek attempted to complete the
dismantling of Jewish bourgeoisie, which began with War Communism.
However, information about bleak life of Jewish population in USSR was
leaking out into Jewish press abroad. YevSeks attempted to blame that on the
Czars regime which allegedly obstructed Jewish participation in productive
labor, that is by communist definition, in physical labor. And since Jews still
prefer unproductive labor, they inevitably suffer. Soviet authorities has
nothing to do with it.
But Brutskus objected claiming that in reality it was opposite. The class of
Jewish craftsmen nearly disappeared with the annihilation of petty Jewish
manufacture Indeed, professional the Jewish classes grew and become
diversified while excessive numbers of petty Jewish middlemen slowly
decreased under the Tsar because of the gradual development of ethnic Russian
enterprise and deepening business connections between the Pale of Settlement
and inner Russia. But now the Jewish population again was turned into a mass
of petty middlemen.
During the third period of NEP, from spring of 1925 to autumn of 1926,
large tax remissions were made for craftsmen and street vendors and village
fairs were relieved of taxation while activities of state financial inspectors
supervising large businesses were brought under the law. The economy and
well-being of the Jewish population started to recover rapidly. It was a boom for
Jewish craftsmen and merchants specializing in agriculture. Petty
manufacturing grew and successfully competed for raw materials and
resources with state manufacture in the western provinces. At the same time,
a new decree granted political (and, therefore, certain civil) rights to many
Jews.
The second communist assault on private enterprise, which eventually
resulted in the dismantling of NEP, began at the end of 1926. First, private
grain trade was prohibited, followed by bans on raw skins, oil seeds and tobacco
trade Private mills, creameries, tanneries and tobacco houses were
expropriated. Fixed prices on shop merchandise were introduced in the summer
of 1927. Most craftsmen couldnt work because of shortage of raw
materials.2254
The state of affairs in the shtetls of western Russia alarmed international
Jewry. For instance, Pasmanik wrote in 1922 that Jews as people are doomed to
disappear under Bolsheviks and that communists reduced all Russian Jewry into
a crowd of paupers.2255 However, the Western public (including Jews) did not
want to hear all this. The West saw the USSR in good light partly because of
general left-leaning of European intelligentsia but mainly because the world and
American Jewry were now confident in bright future and security of Russian
Jews and skillful Soviet propaganda only deepened this impression.
Benevolent public opinion was extremely instrumental for Soviet leaders in
securing Western, and especially American, financial aid, which was
indispensable for economical recovery after their brave War Communism. As
Lenin said at the Party Congress in 1921, as the revolution didnt spread to
other countries, we should do anything possible to secure assistance of big
progressive capitalism and for that we are ready to pay hundreds of millions and
even billions from our immense wealth, our vast resources, because otherwise
our recovery would take decades.2256 And the business went smoothly as
progressive capitalism showed no scruples about acquiring Russian wealth. The
first Soviet international bank, Roskombank, was founded in 1922. It was
headed by the already mentioned Olof Aschberg (who was reliably delivering
aid to Lenin during entire revolutionary period) and by former Russian private
bankers (Shlezinger, Kalashkin and Ternovsky). There was also Max May of
Morgan Guaranty Trust in the US who was of great assistance to Soviets. Now
they developed a scheme allowing Roskombank to directly purchase goods in
US, despite the futile protests from the Secretary of State Charles Hughes, who
asserted that this kind of relations meant a de-facto recognition of Soviet
regime. A Roskombank Swedish adviser, professor G. Kassel, said that it is
reckless to leave Russia with all her resources alone.2257
Concessioners flocked into USSR where they were very welcome. Here we
see Lenins favorite, Armand Hammer, who in 1921 decided to help rebuild
Ural industry and procured a concession on asbestos mines at Alapayevsk.
Lenin mentioned in 1921 that Hammers father will provide two million stones
of bread on very favorable terms (5%) in exchange for Ural jewelry to be sold in
America.2258 And Hammer shamelessly exported Russian art treasures in
exchange for the development of pencil manufacturing. (Later, in the times of
Stalin and Khrushchev, Hammer frequented Moscow, continuing to export

2254. . //
, 1928, . 36, . 513-518.
2255.. . , . 194, 195.
2256.. . . 15 1921 //
: 45 . 4- . . 32, . 201.
2257. . - / . . ., 1998, . 64-66,
193.
2258.. . : 55 . 5- . . 53, . 267.
Russian cultural treasures (e.g., church utensils, icons, paintings, china, etc. in
huge volumes.)
However, in 1921-22 large sums were donated by American Jewry and
distributed in Russia by the American Relief Administration (ARA) for
assistance to the victims of bloody pogroms, for the rescue of towns in the
South of Russia and for the peasantry of Volga Region. Many ARA associates
were Jews .2259

Another novel idea from the 20s not so much an idea originating among Jews
as one dreamed up to appeal to them, was Jewish colonization of agricultural
land. It is said their history of dispersion had denied them possibilities in
agriculture and forced them to engage in money lending, commerce and trade.
Now at last Jews could occupy the land and thereby renounce the harmful ways
of the past to labor productively under Soviet skies, and thus putting to flight
the unflattering myths which had grown up about them.
Soviet authorities turned to the idea of colonization partially to improve
productivity, but mostly for political reasons. This was sure to bring a swell of
sympathy, but more important, financial aid. Brutskus writes: the Soviet
government, needing credits, searched for support among the foreign
bourgeoisie and highly valued its relations with the foreign Jewish bourgeoisie.
However, towards 1924 the donations stopped pouring in and even the Jewish
American Charity (Joint Committee) was forced to halt its work in Europe. To
again collect large amounts of money (as they had through the American Relief
Administration in 1921), they needed to create, as they say in the U.S., a
boom. Colonization became the boom for Jewish charities. The grandiose
project for resettling 100,000 Jewish families on their own land was, apparently,
mostly a public relations ploy.2260 The committee for the State Land Trust for
Jewish Laborers (KomZET) was founded In 1924, followed by the all-Soviet
Volunteer Land Society of Jewish Laborers (OZET). (I remember as school
children we were made to join and pay membership dues by bringing money
from home, to ODD (Society of Friends of the Children) and OZET. In many
countries sister organizations to OZET sprung up.
It was immediately clear that the assistance of the Soviet government in
the passage of poor Jews to the land was a matter of international
significance Through this the foreign proletariat could judge the power and
solidity of the Soviet government. This development had the active
participation and financial support of the powerful America Joint. The Jewish
Chronicle of London, Oct 16,1925: The Crimea has been offered as
replacement for Palestine. Why send Jews to Palestine which is so

2259. . //
, 1928, .36, . 525.
2260 , . 524-526.
unproductive and which will mean so much sacrifice and hard work when
the rich land of Ukraine and fruited fields of the Crimea are smiling upon
suffering Jews. Moscow will be the benefactor and defender of Russian Jewry
and will be able to seek moral support from Jews around the globe As well,
the plan will cost nothing, as American Jews are covering all expenses. 2261
[Translators note: find this quote in English]
It didnt take the Russian migr press long to recognize the Soviet
maneuver. P. Struve in the Parisian journal Renaissancewrote: this entire
undertaking serves to bind Jewry both Russian and international to
communist power and definitively mark Jews with the brand of
communism.2262 In a lead editorial from the Berlin Rul: Its true the world
identifies the Bolsheviks with the Jews. There is a need to further connect them
with shared responsibility for the fate of hundreds of thousands of poor. Then
you can trick wealthy American Jews with a threat: the fall of Soviet power
followed by a mass pogrom which sweeps away the Jewish societies they
founded. Therefore they will support Soviet power at all costs.2263
In a fateful irony, the Bolshevik bluff met American enterprise and the
Americans fell for it, not knowing what was going on in the USSR.2264
Actually, the world Jewish community was excited by hope in the
rehabilitation of Jewish agriculture. In September, 1925 at the all-German
session the Jewish bourgeoisie under the leadership of the Director of the
German National Bank, Hialmar Schacht decided to support the project. Leon
Blum founded the Jewish Construction Fund in France which sent tractors to
the settlers. The Society for Aid for Jewish Land Colonization was founded in
New York. In countries around the globe, all the way to South Africa, money
was collected for the colonization plan from Social Democrats, anarchists, and,
so they say, ordinary workers.
The editors of the American magazine Morning Journal, posed the question
as did many others Is it ethical for Russian Jews to colonize land that was
expropriated? The Jewish Chronicle recalled that most of the former land
owners were in prison, shot or exiled. They were answered by the leading
American jurist Louis Marshall and chairman of the World Joint Committee
who claimed the beneficent right of revolutionary expropriation.2265 Indeed,
during the years 1919-1923 more than 23,000 Jews had settled in former
estates near the towns and villages in the former Pale of Settlement. By spring
1923, no more of this land remained available and the first small groups of Jews

2261. *, . 293, 297-298.

2262. . // , , 1925, 25
( 145), . 1.
2263, , 1925, 1 ( 1469), . 1.
2264. . // , 1925, 6
( 1699), . 2.
2265. , . 295, 296, 300-302.
started to form for resettlement to the free steppe land in Southern Ukraine. 2266
This movement picked up speed after 1925.
The international Jewish Agro-Joint was formed by Marshall with the
banker Paul Warburg as the director. Here our chroniclers of the history of
communism decline to issue a denunciation of class enemies, and instead,
approve of their efforts.
The Agro-Joint concluded an agreement with KomZET about the
contribution of tractors, farm machinery, seed, the digging of artesian wells and
professional training for Jewish youth. EKO assisted as well. At a 1926 session
of OZET Kalinin spoke out forcefully against any plans for Jewish assimilation
and, instead, proposed a wide-ranging program for Jewish autonomy known in
the West as the Kalinin Declaration.
The early plans called for resettlement to the south of Ukraine and northern
Crimea of approximately 100,000 families or 20% of the entire Jewish
population of the USSR. The plans contemplated separate Jewish national
regions as well. (Many remained jobless and nevertheless declined the
opportunity to work and only half of all Jews who agreed to resettle actually
took up residence in the villages they were supposed to resettle in.)2267
However, American Zionists objected to the OZET plan and saw in the
propaganda for the project of widespread Jewish agricultural colonization in
the Soviet Union a challenge to Zionism and its idea for the settlement of Eretz
Israel. OZET falsely claimed its plans did not contradict at all the idea of
colonization of Palestine.2268
Great hope was placed on Crimea. There were 455,000 hectares given over
to Jewish colonization in Ukraine and Byelorussia; 697,000 hectares set aside in
Crimea for that purpose. According to the 10-Year Plan for the settlement of
Jews in Crimea, the Jewish proportion of the population was to grow from 8%
in 1929 to 25% in 1939. (It was assumed that the Jews would substantially
outnumber the Tatars by that time.) There shall be no obstacles to the creation
in the Crimean ASSR a Northern Crimean Autonomous Jewish Republic or
oblast.2269
The settlement of the Jews in the Crimea provoked the hostility of the
Tatars (Are they giving Crimea to the Jews?) and dissatisfaction of local
landless peasants. Larin writes evil and false rumors are circulating throughout
the country about removal of land from non-Jews, the expulsion of non-Jews
and the particularly strong support the authorities have given to the Jewish
settlers. It went so far that the chairman of the CIK of the Crimean ASSR, Veli
Ibraimov published an interview in the Simferopol paper Red Crimea (Sept 26,
1926) which Larin does not quote from, but which he claims was a
manifestation of evil bourgeois chauvinism and a call for a pogrom.

2266, . 8, . 184.
2267, . 8, . 185, 188.
2268, . 6, . 139-140.
2269. , . 74, 174, 175, 308.
 Ibraimov also promulgated a resolution and projects, which were not yet
ready for publication (also not quoted by Larin). For this, Larin denounced
Ibraimov to the Central Control Commission of CK of VKPb, recounting the
incident with pride in his book. As a result Ibraimov was removed and then
shot, after which the Jewish colonization of Crimea gained strength.
As was typical for the communist regime, the closed trial of Ibraimov
resulted in a political conviction for connections with a Kulak bandit gang,
officially, for banditry.2270 A certain Mustafa, the assistant to the chair of the
CIK, was also shot with Ibraimov as a bandit.2271
Rumors of the effective assistance given to the Jewish settlers did not die
down. The authorities tried to counter them. A government newspaper in 1927
wrote the generous assistance to Jewish settlers is coming from Jewish
community organizations (without mentioning they were Western
organizations), and not from the government as is rumored. To refute the
rumors, Shlikhter (that young brawler from Kievs Duma in October, 1905),
now Narkom of Agriculture of Ukraine, toured over the South of Ukraine.
Rumors that the Jews were not working the land given to them but were renting
it out or hiring farm laborers, were met with: we havent observed this
behavior, but the Jewish settlers must be forbidden to rent out their land and
the unhealthy atmosphere surrounding the Jewish resettlement must be
countered with the widest possible education campaign.2272
The article allows one to judge about the scale of events. It states that 630
Jewish households moved into Kherson Province between the end of 1925 and
July of 1927.2273 In 1927, there were 48 Jewish agricultural settlements in
Ukraine with a total population of 35,000. In Crimea, 4463 Jews lived in Jewish
agricultural settlements in 1926.2274 Other sources implausibly claimed that by
1928, 220,000 Jews lived in Jewish agricultural colonies.2275 Similarly, Larin
mentioned 200,000 by the beginning of 1929. Where does this order of
magnitude discrepancy come from? Larin here contradicts himself, saying that
in 1929 the share of Jews in agriculture was negligible, less than 0.2% (and
almost 20% among merchants and 2% in population in general).2276
Mayakovsky saw it differently:
A hard toiling Jew
Tills the rocky land
However, the program of Jewish land colonization, for all practical
purposes, was a failure. For many of the settlers there was little motivation to
stay. It didnt help that the resettlement and the building project had come from
on high and the money from western organizations. A lot of government

2270 , . 150-152, 233-234.

2271, 1928, 1 , . 4.
2272, 1927, 13 , . 4.
2273 .
2274, . 2, . 552, . 4, . 599.
2275. . // -2, . 137.
2276. , . 97-98, 236.
assistance for Jewish settlers didnt help. It is little known that tractors from
neighboring collective farms were ordered to till Jewish land. 2277 Despite the
flow of 2-3 thousand resettling Jewish families, by the end of five year work
Jewish settlements in Crimea listed only around 5 thousand families instead
of pre-planned 10 to 15 thousand. The reason was that settlers frequently
returned to their place of origin or moved to the cities of Crimea or other parts
of the country.2278 This mass departure of Jews from agriculture in the 1920s
and 30s resembles similar Jewish withdrawal from agricultural colonies in the
19th century, albeit now there were many new occupations available in industry
(and in administration, a prohibited field for Jews in Tsarist Russia).2279
Eventually, collectivization arrived. Suddenly in 1930 Semyon
Dimanstein, for many years the head of the Jewish Section of CK of VKPb, a
staunch communist who bravely put up with all Soviet programs in the 20s,
came out in the press against universal collectivization in the national regions.
He was attempting to protect the Jewish colony from collectivization which he
had been warned about.2280 However, collectivization came, not sparing the
fresh shoots of Jewish land stewardship.2281 At almost the same time, the
Jewish and non-Jewish Kolkhozes were combined under the banner of
internationalism2282 and the program of Jewish settlement in Ukraine and
Crimea was finally halted.
The principal Soviet project of Jewish colonization was at Birobidzhan, a
territory nearly the size of Switzerland between the 2 branches of the Amur
river near the Chinese border. It has been described variously. In 1956
Khrushchev bragged in conversations with Canadian communists that the soil
was rich, the climate was southern, there was much sun and water and rivers
filled with fish and vast forests. The Socialist Vestnik described it as covered
with wild taiga swampland made up a significant portion of the territory. 2283
According the Encyclopedia Britannica: a plain with swamps in places, but a
fertile land along the Amur.2284
The project came about in 1927 from the KomZET (a committee of the
CIK) and was intended to: turn a significant part of the Jewish population into
a settled agricultural people in one location (Kalinin). Also the Jewish
Autonomous Republic was to serve as a counterweight to Zionism, creating a
national homeland with at least half a million population.2285 (One possible

2277 , . 206.
2278, . 4, . 600.
2279, . 2, . 554.
2280 , . 354.
2281. . // -2, . 137.
2282, . 2, . 554.
2283 // , -, 1958, 7-8,
. 142-143.
2284Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 1981, Vol. X., p. 817, clmn. 2.
2285*, T. 1, c. 445-446. 159 . , . 183-184.
motive behind the plan which cannot be excluded: to wedge a loyal Soviet
population into the hostile Cossack frontier.)
OZET sent a scientific expedition to Birobidzhan in 1927 and, before large
settlements of Jews began arriving, in 1928 started preparations and building for
the settlement using laborers from the local populace and wandering work
crews of Chinese and Koreans.
Older residents of the area Trans-Baikal Cossacks exiled there between
the 1860s and the 1880s and already tested by the hardships of the frontier
woods remember being concerned about the Jewish settlement. The Cossacks
needed vast tracts of land for their farming methods and feared they would be
crowded out of lands they used for hunting and hay harvesting. The KomZET
commission report was a preliminary plan for the possible gradual resettlement
of 35,000 families. But reality was different. The CIK of VKPb in 1928
assigned Birobidzhan for Jewish colonization and preparation of first settler
trains began immediately. For the first time ever, city dwellers (from Ukraine
and Byelorussia) without any preparation for agricultural labor were sent to
farm the land. (They were lured by the prospect of having the status of
lishenets removed.).2286
The Komsomol published the Monthly OZET and Pioneer delegations
traveled around the country collecting for the Birobidzhan resettlement.
The hastily dispatched Jewish families were horrified by the conditions
they met upon arrival. They moved into barracks at the Tikhonkaya railroad
station, in the future town of Birobidzhan. Among the inhabitants were
some who never left the barracks for the land, living off the loans and credits
they managed to obtain for making the move. Others less nimble, lived in abject
poverty.2287
During the first year of work at Birobidzhan only 25 huts were built, only
125 hectares were plowed and none were planted. Many did not remain in
Birobidzhan; 1,000 workers arrived in the Spring of 1928 and by July, 25% of
all those who arrived in 1928 had left. By February 1929 more than half of the
population had abandoned Birobidzhan.2288 From 1928 to 1933 more than
18,000 arrived, yet the Jewish population grew only by 6,000. By some
calculations only 14% of those Jews who resettled remained in 1929. 2289 They
returned either to their homes or moved to Khabarovsk and Vladivostok.
Larin, who devotes no small number of reasoned and impassioned pages to
the building of Jewish agriculture sniffs that an unhealthy fuss has been
raised around Birobidzhan a utopian settlement of a million Jews
Resettlement was practically presented as a national obligation of Soviet Jews,
Zionism turned inside out a kind of back-to-the-province movement. While
international Jewish organizations provided no finances for Birobidzhan, from

2286Larine, pp. 183-184.

2287 // * 1958, 7-8, . 144.
2288. , . 188, 189.
2289, . 1, . 448, . 8, . 188.
the beginning considering it too expensive and risky for them.2290 More likely
the western Jewish organizations, Agro-Joint, ORT and EKO could not support
the distant project beyond the Urals.2291 It wasnt a Jewish plan, but a scheme
of Soviet authorities eager to tear down and build life anew in the country.

From the October revolution to the end of the 20s the lives of ordinary Jews
were affected by the actions of Yevseks members of the YevSek (The Jewish
section of the CK of VKPb.) Besides the Jewish Commissariat, an active Jewish
organization grew up in the VKPb. As well, from 1918, local organizations were
formed in the guberniyas. They created an environment fanatically inspired with
the idea and ideas of communism, even more so than was Soviet authority itself
and at times these organizations even opposed Soviet projects. For example, at
the insistence of the YevSek, the Jewish Commissariat decreed Hebrew to be a
language of reaction and counter-revolution in early 1919, requiring Jewish
schools to teach in Yiddish.2292 The Central Bureau of the YevSek was part of
the CK of VKPb and local YevSeks operated in the former Pale of Settlement.
The purpose of the YevSek was communist education and Sovietization of the
Jewish population in their native language of Yiddish.
From 1924 to 1928 responsibility for all Jewish education and culture
was under the Jewish Bureaus of the republic-level administrative bodies, but
these were abolished for excesses in forced Yiddishization and more power
accrued to the YevSek.2293
The activities of the YevSek in the 20s were contradictory. On one hand
they carried out active agitprop work in communist education in Yiddish and
mercilessly battled against Judaism, traditional Jewish education, Jewish social
structures, independent Jewish organizations, political parties and movements,
Zionism and Hebrew. On the other hand it opposed assimilation with its support
of the Yiddish language and a Yiddish culture and organizations of Jewish
education, Jewish scientific research and activity to improve the economic
status of Soviet Jews. In this the YevSek often held a more radical position
than even the central party bodies.2294
The anti-Zionist YevSek was made up to a large degree of former
Bundists and socialist-territorialists2295 who were thought of as traitors or
neophyte communists in VKPb. The purpose of the YevSek was to develop
communist influence on Russian Jewry and to create a Jewish Soviet nation
isolated from world Jewry. But at the same time its actions paradoxically turned
it from a technical apparatus urging the Jewish population to build socialism
2290. , . 184, 186-189.
2291, . 8, . 188.
2292, . 8, . 146.
2293 , . 165-166.
2294 , . 166.
2295, . 7, . 947.
into a focal point for Jewish life in the USSR. A split arose in the YevSek
between supporters of forced assimilation and those who thought its work
was a necessary means of preservation of the Jewish people.2296
The Book of Russian Jewry observes with sympathy that the activity of the
YevSek still carried a clear and expressly Jewish stamp under the banner of the
Proletariat. For instance in 1926 using the slogan to the countryside!, [meant
to rouse interest in working in and propagandizing rural areas] the YevSek came
up with to the Shtetl!
This activity resonated widely in Jewish circles in Poland and in the
U.S. The author further calls it a many-faceted Jewish nationalism in
communist form.2297 But in 1926 the CP halted the activity of the YevSek and
turned it into the Jewish Bureau. In 1930 the Jewish Bureau was closed along
with all national sections of VKPb2298. After that the activity of the YevSeks
continued under the banner of communism. Russian Jewry lost all forms of
self-expression, including communistic forms.2299
The end of the YevSek symbolized the final dissolution of the Bund
movement to allow a separate nationalist existence, even if it went against
strict social-democratic theory.2300 However, after the YevSek was abolished,
many of the former Yevseks and Jewish socialists did not come to their senses
and put the building of socialism higher than the good of their own people or
any other good, staying to serve the party-government apparatus. And that
overflowing service was evident more than anything.
Whether statistically or using a wealth of singular examples, it is obvious
that Jews pervaded the Soviet power structure in those years. And all this
happened in the state that persecuted freedom of speech, freedom of commerce
and religion, not to mention its denigration of human worth.

Bikerman and Pasmanik paint a very gloomy picture of the state of Jewish
culture in the USSR in 1923: all is torn up and trampled underfoot in the field
of Jewish culture.2301 All foundations of a nationalist Jewish culture are
shaken and all that is sacred is stomped into the mud. 2302 S. Dubnov saw
something similar in 1922 and wrote about rueful wreckage and a picture of
ruin and the progress of dark savages, destroying the last remnants of a bygone
culture.2303

2296, . 2, . 465.
2297. . // -2, . 137.
2298, . 2, . 465.
2299. . // 22, 1988, 60, . 161.
2300Leonard Schapiro. The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement // The
Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 40, 1961-62, p. 167.
2301 ! // , . 5.
2302.. . ? // , . 214.
2303 . *, . 195.
 However, Jewish historiography did not suffer destruction in the first 10
years after the revolution, as is attested to by the range of allowed publications.
Government archives, including those from the department of police, opened
after the revolution have given Jewish scholars a view on Jewish participation
in the revolutionary movement, pogroms, and blood libel trials. The Jewish
Historical-Ethnographical Society was founded in 1920 and published the 2-
volume Material on theHistory of anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. The Society
later came under attack from the YevSek and it was abolished in 1929. The
journals, The Jewish News and The Jewish Chronicle were shut down in the
mid-twenties. S. Dubnovs Jewish Antiquity remained in publication (even after
he left the USSR in 1922) but was closed in 1930. The Jewish Ethnographical
Museum functioned from 1916, but was closed in 1930.2304
In the 1920s, Jewish culture had two divergent fates one in Hebrew and
one in Yiddish. Hebrew was strongly repressed and forbidden as authorities saw
it as a carrier of religion and Zionism. Before the consolidation of Soviet power
in the years 1917-1919 there were more than 180 books, brochures, and
journals in Hebrew (mostly in Odessa, but also in Kiev and Moscow). The
feeling that the fate of Hebrew was connected with the fate of the victorious
communist revolution held in the early 20s among young people attempting to
create a revolutionary literary tribune, under whose banner they hoped to unite
the creative youthful strength of world Jewry.2305 However at the insistence of
the YevSek, Hebrew was declared a reactionary language and already in 1919
the Peoples Commissariat of Education had forbidden the teaching of Hebrew
in all educational institutions. The removal of all Hebrew books from libraries
had begun.2306
Yiddish culture fared much better. Yiddish was the language of the Jewish
masses. According to the 1926 census, 73% of Jews listed Yiddish as their
mother tongue2307 (another source cites a figure of 66% 2308) that is the Jewish
population could preserve its culture in Yiddish. Soviet authorities used this. If,
in the early years of Soviet power and Bolshevism the opinion prevailed that
Jews should discard their language and nationality, later the Jewish
Commissariat at the Narkomat of Nationalities, the YevSek, and the Jewish
sections of the republican narkomats of education began to build Soviet culture
in Yiddish. In the 20s Yiddish was declared one of the official languages of
Byelorussia; In Odessa of the 20s and even the 30s it was a language of many
government institutions, with Jewish hours on the radio and court
proceedings in Yiddish.2309

2304, . 2, . 439, , . 2, . 432, . . // 22, 1988. 60, .

161.
2305. . // -2, . 241-242, 246.
2306, . 2, . 422.
2307. . (1939-1965).
-: . , 1966, . 407.
2308. , . 56.
2309, . 1, . 326, . 2, . 465, . 6, . 125.
 A rapid growth in Yiddish schools began in 1923 throughout the Soviet
Union. Beginning in 1923 and continuing through 1930 a program of
systematic Yiddishization was carried out, even forced, upon Jewish schools
in the former Pale of Settlement. Many schools were switched to Yiddish
without considering the wishes of parents. In 1923 there were 495 Yiddish
schools with 70,000 Jewish children, by 1928 there were 900 schools and in
1930 they had 160,000 children. (This can be partially explained by the fact that
Ukrainians and Byelorussians at this time received full cultural autonomy and
saw Jewish children as potential agents of Russification; Jewish parents didnt
want their children in Ukrainian or Byelorussian schools and there were no
more Russian schools they had no choice but to go to Yiddish schools. They
did not study Jewish history in these schools; instead there was class war and
the Jews.2310 (Just as in the Russian schools there was no study of Russian
history, or of any history, only social sciences.) Throughout the 20s even
those few elements of a specifically Jewish education were gradually driven out
of Soviet Jewish schools. By the early 30s the autonomously functioning
system of Soviet Jewish schools had been officially done away with.2311
From 1918 there were independent Jewish schools of higher education
ENU (Jewish Peoples University) until 1922 in Moscow; PENU in Petrograd
which became Petrograd IVEZ (Institute of Higher Jewish Learning, one of
whose founders and later Rector was Semyon Lozinsky) boasting a number of
distinguished scholars among faculty and large number of Jewish graduates.
Supported by Joint, IVEZ functioned until 1925. Jewish divisions were
established at educational science departments at Byelorussian University
(1922) and at Second Moscow State University (1926). Central Jewish CP
School teaching in Yiddish was established in 1921. Jewish educational system
included special educational science technical colleges and more than 40
industrial and agricultural training schools.2312
Jewish culture continued to exist and even received no small
encouragement but on the terms of Soviet authorities. The depths of Jewish
history were closed. This took place on a background of the destruction of
Russian historical and philosophical sciences complete with arrests of scholars.
Jewish culture of the 20s could more accurately be called a Soviet
proletarian culture in Yiddish. And for that kind of Jewish culture the
government was ready to provide newspapers and theatre. Forty years later
the Book of Russian Jewry gives a less than gloomy assessment of the cultural
situation of Jews in the USSR in the early Soviet years. In Moscow the
worldwide Jewish Telegraphic agency (ETA) continued to exist into the 40s as
an independent unit the only such agency in the Soviet nation that did not
come under TASS, sending communications abroad (of course, subject to
Soviet censorship). Newspapers were published in Yiddish, the main one being

2310. . // -2, . 235-238.

2311, . 8, .175.
2312 , . 177-179, , . 2, . 195-196.
the house organ of the YevSek, The Moscow Der Amos from 1920 to 1938.
According to Dimanstein there were 34 Yiddish publishers in 1928.
Yiddish literature was encouraged, but, naturally, with a purpose: to turn
Jews away from an historical Jewish past; to show before October as a
gloomy prologue to the epoch of happiness and a new dawn; to smear anything
religious and find in the Soviet Jew the new man. Even with all this, it was so
attractive to some prominent Jewish writers who had left the country that they
started to return to the USSR: poets David Gofstein (always suspected of
harboring nationalist sentiment) and Leib Kvitko (easily accommodated to
Soviet environment and become a prolific poet) returned in 1925; Perez
Markish (easily understands the needs of the party) in 1926; Moses Kulbak
and Der Nistor (the real name of the latter was Pinkhos Kaganovich, he later
wrote novel Mashber Family characterized as the most un-Soviet and liberal
work of Jewish prose in Soviet Union) returned in 1928. David Bergelson
returned in 1929, he paid tribute to those in power: the revolution has a right
to cruelty.2313 (Which he, Markish and Kvitko were to experience themselves in
1952.)
The bourgeois Hebrew culture was suppressed. A group of writers headed
by H.N. Byalik left for Palestine in 1921. Another group of Hebrew writers
existed until the mid-30s, occasionally publishing in foreign journals. Some of
these authors were arrested and disappeared without a trace while others
managed to escape the Soviet Union.2314
Regarding Jewish culture expressed in Russian language, Yevseks
interpreted it as the result of government-directed efforts to assimilate Jews in
Tsarist Russia. Among those writing in Yiddish, a split between proletarian
writers and companions developed in mid-20s, like in Soviet literature at
large. Majority of mainstream authors then switched to Russian language.2315
The Jewish Chamber Theater in Yiddish in Moscow flowered since 1921 at
a high artistic level with government aid (in 1925 it was transformed into the
State Jewish Theater, GosET). It traveled through Europe and became an
unexpected representative of Soviet power in the eyes of world Jewry. It made
fun of pre-revolutionary ways and religious life of the shtetl. Mikhoels excelled
as an actor and in 1928 became the director.2316
The history of the Hebrews theater Gabima, which began before the
revolution was much more complicated. Originally supported by Lunacharsky,
Gorky and Stanislavsky it was persecuted as a Zionist nest by the YevSek and
it took a decision by Lenin to allow it to exist. Gabima became a government
theatre. It remained the only outpost of Hebrew in the USSR, though it was
clear it had no future.2317 (The theatre critic A. Kugel said it had departed from

2313. . // -2, . 224-229.

2314. . // -2, . 245, 247.
2315, . 8, . 174, 181-182.
2316. . // -2, . 266-271.
2317, . 9, . 477.
Jewish daily life and lost its Jewish spirit. 2318) In 1926 the troupe went on a
European tour and did not return, disappearing from history soon after.2319
By contrast, the government Yiddish theatre was a real boon for Jewish
theater arts in the USSR. In the early 30s there were 19 professional Yiddish
theater groups with a training school at GosET in Moscow, and Jewish
dramatic arts studios in Kiev, Minsk and Moscow.2320
Here it is worth remembering the posthumous treatment of the ill-fated
Jewish Gogol Semen Ushkevitch. His bookEpisodes, published in 1926
satirizes revolution-era Jewish bourgeois. He died in 1927 and in 1928 the
Soviet censor banned his play Simka, The Rabbit Hearted based on his earlier
book. As an anti- bourgeois work it should have been fine, but taking place in a
Jewish setting and making fun of the stupidity, cowardice and greed of its
subjects, it was banned because of fears that it would cause Judeophobic
feelings.2321

In the meantime what was the condition of Zionist organizations in the USSR?
They were fundamentally incompatible with communist authority and were
accused of international imperialism and collaboration with the Entente.
Because of their international standing the Soviets had to deal carefully with
them. In 1920 the YevSek declared a civil war on the Jewish street against the
Zionist organizations. Repression of Zionism deepened with the ban on Hebrew.
However anti-Zionist pressure did not exist everywhere and was not
sufficiently severe that is long-term imprisonment and exile were
relatively rare. In spring 1920 right-wing Zionists were frightened with arrests,
but on May 1 were amnestied.
The dual policy of the Kremlin was apparent in its discussions with
representatives of the World Zionist Organization. Chicherin did not dismiss out
of hand its the latters solicitations as the Soviets were not yet ready to
denounce Zionism once and for all as had the YevSek. The more so since
from the beginning of NEP, lessening government pressure gave Zionist
groups a breathing space.2322 Interestingly, Dzerzhinsky wrote in 1923 that the
program of the Zionists is not dangerous to us, on the contrary I consider it
useful and again in 1924 principally, we can be friends with Zionists. 2323 The
Central Zionist Bureau existed in Moscow from 1920 to 1924. In March of
1924 its members were arrested and only after much pleading from within the
country and from overseas was exile to Central Asia replaced with exile

2318, . 4, . 616.
2319. . // -2, . 273-278.
2320, . 8, . 183.
2321. . // 22, 1984, 34, . 204.
2322.. . , // -2. 321-323.
2323, . 8, . 200.
abroad.2324 In 1923 only two officially permitted Zionist organizations remained:
Poale-Zion and the legal portion of the youth organization Gekhaluz, whose
purpose was agricultural colonization of Palestine. They saw experience with
collective farms in the USSR as preparation for this. They published a journal
from 1924 to 1926.2325 Even the left-wing of the Zionist socialist party Zirei-
Zion (Youth of Zion) adopted a sharper tone vis a vis the Bolsheviks, and
when the arrests in 1924, though short in duration, became more widespread
they went underground. This underground movement was finally dispersed only
in the late 20s.
Jewish blood will not oil the wheels of revolution, an organizational
slogan of the movement, conveys the sense of the underground Zirei-Zion with
its significant youth organizations in Kiev and Odessa. Regarding the
government, they formally recognized Soviet authority, but at the same time
declared opposition to the dictatorship of the communist party. Much of its
work was directed against the YevSek. In particular, they agitated against the
Crimean resettlement plan, seeing it as disturbing their national isolation.
From 1926 the party weakened and then disappeared.2326
There was a wave of arrests of Zionists from September to October of
1924. Some of those arrested were tried in secret and given sentences of 3 to 10
years in the camps. But in 1925 Zionist delegates were assured by the CIK of
VKPb (Smidovitch) and the Sovnarkom (Rykov) and the GPU that they had
nothing against Zionists as long as they did not arouse the Jewish population
against Soviet power.2327
D. Pasmanik suggested in 1924 that Zionists, Orthodox and nationalist
Jews should be in the front ranks of those fighting alongside Soviet power and
the Bolshevik worldview.2328 But there was no united front and no front rank.
In the second half of the 20s, persecution of the Zionists was renewed and
the exchange of prison sentences for exile abroad was sharply curtailed. In
1928 authorities dissolved, the until then quasi-legal Poale-Zion and liquated
the legal Gekhaluz, closing its farms Almost all underground Zionist
organizations were destroyed at that time. Opportunities to leave declined
sharply after 1926. Some of the Zionists remained in prison or were exiled.2329
The mass attraction of young urban Jews to communist and Soviet culture
and programs was matched with a no less stubborn resistance from religious
Jewry and older Jews from the former Pale. The party used the rock of the
YevSek to crush and suppress this resistance.
One only has to be in a Jewish city such as Minsk or Vitebsk to see how
all that was once worthy in Judaism, respected and worthy of respect has been

2324 , . 201.
2325, . 5, . 476, . 7, . 948.
2326 . . , 1996, . 74-79.
2327.. . , // -2, . 324-325.
2328.. . ? // , , 214.
2329, . 7, . 948. .. . , // -2, .
325-328.
turned upside down, crushed with poverty, insult, and hopelessness and how
those pushed into higher places are the dissolute, frivolous, arrogant and
brazen.2330 Bolshevik power become the carrier of terrible ruin, material and
moral in our Jewish world.2331 The mass of Jewish Bolsheviks on one hand
and of Jewish NEPmen on the other indicate the depth of the cultural collapse
of Jewry. And if radical healing from Bolshevism among the Russian people is
to come from a revival of religious, moral and nationalist life then the Jewish
idea must work for that also in their lives.2332
And work they did, but indicators vary as to degree of intensity and
success. A near contemporary considered Jewish society turned out either to
have no rudder and no sail or was confused and in this confusion spiritually
turned away from its sources in contrast to Russian society where there was
still some resistance, albeit clumsy and unsuccessful. 2333 From the end of the
20s to the beginning of the 30s the Jews abandoned their traditional way of life
on a mass scale.2334 In the past 20 years Russian Jewry has gone further and
further away from its historical past killing the Jewish spirit and Jewish
tradition.2335 And a few years later on the very eve of WWII with the
ascension in Russia of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the fight between fathers and
children in the Jewish street has taken a particularly bitter form.2336
Taking stock a half-century later, M. Agursky reminisces in Israel, that the
misfortunes that befell Jews after the revolution to a large degree were brought
on by the renunciation by Jewish youth of its religion and national culture, the
singular, exclusive influence of communist ideology The mass penetration
by Jews in all areas of Russian life and of the Soviet leadership in the first 20
years after the revolution turned not to be constructive for Jews, but harmful.2337
Finally, an author in the 1990s writes: Jews were the elite of the
revolution and on the winning side. Thats a peculiar fact of the Russian
internationalist socialist revolution. In the course of modernizing, Jewry was
politically Bolshevized and socially Sovietized: The Jewish community as an
ethnic, religious and national structure disappeared without a trace. 2338 Jewish
youth coming to Bolshevism were intoxicated by its new role and influence. For
this, others too would have gladly given up their nationality. But this turning
from the old ways to internationalism and atheism was not the same as
assimilation into the surrounding majority, a centuries-old Jewish fear. This was
leaving the old, along with all other youth, to come together and form a
2330.. . // , . 92.
2331 , , 53.
2332... // , . 138.
2333.. . // , . 118.
2334, . 8, . 199.
2335.. . : . , 1934. . 3, .
376.
2336. . // -1, . 47.
2337Jerusalem Post, 1973, April 13, 1979, October 7.
2338Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lugen: Rufiland und die Juden im20. Jahrhundert. Berlin:
Siedler Verlag. 1992, S. 106.
new Soviet people. Only a small stream was truly assimilationalist in the old
sense, like those people who converted to Orthodox Christianity and wished
their own dissolution in the Russian culture. We find one such example in
attorney Y. Gurevich, legal defender of metropolitan Venamin during his fatal
trial in 1922.2339
The Jewish Encyclopedia writes of Jewish workers in the party and
government apparatus of economic, scientific and even military organizations
and institutions, that most did not hide their Jewish origins, but they and their
families quickly absorbed Russian culture and language and being Jewish lost
its cultural content.2340
Yes, the culture which sustained them suffered, Soviet Man was created,
but the decades which followed showed that a remnant of Jewish self-awareness
was preserved and remained. Even in the flood of the internationalism of the
20s, mixed marriages (between Jews and Russians or Jews and any non-Jew),
as measured from 1924-1926, were only 6.3% of the total marriages for Jews in
the USSR, including 16.8% in RSFSR, but only 2.8% in Byelorussia and 4.5%
in Ukraine2341 (according to another source, on average in USSR, 8.5%; in
RSFSR, 21%; in Byelorussia, 3.2%; and in Ukraine, 5% 2342). Assimilation had
only begun.

And what was the status of the Jewish religion in the new conditions?
Bolshevik power was hostile to all religions. During the years of the hardest
blows against the Orthodox Church, Jewish religious practice was treated with
restraint. In March, 1922 Dar Amos noted that the department of agitprop of
the Central Committee would not offend religious feelings In the 20s this
tolerance did not extend to Russian Orthodoxy, which the authorities considered
one of the main enemies of the Soviet order.2343 Nevertheless, the confiscation
of church valuables extended to synagogues as well. E. Yarolslavsky wrote
in Izvestia an article titled What Can be Taken from a Synagogue: Often
Rabbis will say there is nothing of value in a synagogue. Usually that is the
case The walls are usually bare. But menorahs are often made of silver. These
must be confiscated. Three weeks before that 16 silver objects were taken from
Jewish preaching house on Spasso-Glinischevsky avenue and in the neighboring
choral synagogue 57 silver objects and 2 of gold. Yaroslavsky further
proposes a progressive tax on those who buy costly seats in the
synagogue.2344 (Apparently, this proposal went nowhere.)
2339. . -, . 114.
2340, . 1, . 235.
2341. . * // -1, . 271.
2342. *, . 304.
2343, . 8, . 194.
2344 * // , 1922, 21 (
120), . 7.
 However functionaries from the YevSek demanded of authorities that the
same policy applied towards Christianity be carried out towards Judaism. 2345 In
the Jewish New Year, 1921 the YevSek orchestrated a public trial of the Jewish
religion in Kiev. The Book of Russian Jewry describes this and other show
trials in 1921-1922: there was a court proceeding against a Cheder (a traditional
elementary school with instruction in Hebrew) in Vitebsk, against a Yeshiva (a
Jewish school for study of the traditional, texts, the Talmud, the Torah, and the
Rabbinical literature) in Rostov and even against Day of Atonement in Odessa.
They were intentionally conducted in Yiddish, as the YeSsek explained, so that
Jewish Bolsheviks would judge Judaism.
Religious schools were closed by administrative order and in December
1920 the Jewish section of the Narkomat of Education issued a encyclical about
the liquidation of Cheders and Yeshivas. Nevetheless, large numbers of
Cheders and Yeshivas continued teaching semi-legally or completely
underground for a long time after that.2346 In spite of the ban on religious
education, as a whole the 20s were rather a liberal period for Jewish religious
life in the USSR.2347
[A]t the request of Jewish laborers, of course, there were several attempts
to close synagogues, but this met with bitter opposition from believers. Still
during the 20s the central synagogues were closed in Vitebsk, Minsk, Gomel,
Kharkov, Bobruisk.2348 The central Moscow synagogue on Maroseika managed
stay open thanks to the efforts of Rabbi Maze in the face of Dzerzhinsky and
Kalinin.2349 In 1926, the choral synagogue in Kiev was closed and childrens
Yiddish theatre opened in its place .2350 But the majority of synagogues
continued to function. In 1927, 1034 synagogues and prayer halls were
functioning in Ukraine and the number of synagogues towards the end of the
20s exceeded the number in 1917.2351
Authorities attempted to institute Living Synagogues based on the model
of the Living Church imposed upon the Russian Orthodox Church. A portrait
of Lenin was to be hung in a prominent place of such a synagogue, the
authorities brought in red Rabbis and communized Rabbis. However they
failed to bring about a split among the believers2352 and the vast majority of
religious Jews was decisively against the Living Synagogue, bringing the plan
of Soviet authorities to naught.2353
At the end of 1930 a group of rabbis from Minsk was arrested. They were
freed after two weeks and made to sign a document prepared by the GPU

2345, . 8, . 196.
2346. . // -2, . 205-207.
2347, . 8, . 194.
2348 , . 195.
2349. . // -2, . 209.
2350, . 4, . 257.
2351, . 8, . 195.
2352. . // -2, . 208.
2353, . 8, . 197.
agreeing that: (1) the Jewish religion was not persecuted in the USSR and, (2)
during the entire Soviet era not one rabbi had been shot.2354
Authorities tried to declare the day of rest to be Sunday or Monday in
Jewish areas. School studies were held on the Sabbath by order of the YevSek.
In 1929 authorities tried the five-day work week and the six-day work week
with the day of rest upon the 5th or 6th day, respectively. Christians lost Sunday
and Jews lost the Sabbath. Members of the YevSek rampaged in front of
synagogues on holidays and in Odessa broke into the Brodsky Synagogue and
demonstratively ate bread in front of those fasting and praying. They instituted
community service days during sacred holidays like Yom Kippur. during
holidays, especially when the synagogue was closed, they requisitioned Talles,
Torah scrolls, prayer shawls and religious books import of matzoh from
abroad was sometimes allowed and sometimes forbidden 2355 in 1929 they
started taxing matzoh preparation.2356 Larin notes the amazing permission
granted to bring matzoh from Knigsberg to Moscow for Passover in 1929.2357
In the 20s private presses still published Jewish religious literature. In
Leningrad, Hasids managed to print prayer books in several runs, a few
thousands copies each while Katzenelson, a rabbi from Leningrad, was able to
use the printing-house Red Agitator. During 1920s, the Jewish calendars
were printed and distributed in tens of thousand copies. 2358 The Jewish
community was the only religious group in Moscow allowed to build religious
buildings. A second synagogue was built on Visheslaviz alley nearby
Sushchevsky Embankment and a third in Cherkizov. These three synagogues
stayed open throughout the 30s.2359
But young Jewish writers and poets gleefully wrote about the empty
synagogues, the lonely rabbi who had no one to teach and about the boys from
the villages who grew up to become the terrible red commissars. 2360 And we
saw the Russian members of Komsomol rampaging on Easter Sunday, knocking
candles and holy bread out of worshippers hands, tearing the crosses from the
cupolas and we saw thousands of beautiful churches broken into a rubble of
bricks and we remember the thousands of priests that were shot and the
thousands of others who were sent to the camps.
In those years, we all drove God out.

2354 , . 198.
2355. . // -2, . 208-209.
2356, . 8, . 199.
2357. , . 285.
2358. . // -2, . 246.
2359 : - : 4 . / . .
[. ]. , YMCA-Press, 1988. . 1, . 13. . .
// -1, . 271.
2360. . // , 1981, 20-26
( 84), . 7.
From the early Soviet years the path for Jewish intelligentsia and youth was
open as wide as possible in science and culture, given Soviet restrictions. (Olga
Kameneva, Trotskys sister, patronized high culture in the very early Soviet
years.)
Already in 1919 a large number of Jewish youth went into moviemaking
an art praised by Lenin for its ability to govern the psychology of the masses.
Many of them took charge of movie studios, film schools and film crews. For
example, B. Shumyatsky, one of the founders of the Mongolian Republic, and
S. Dukelsky were heads of the main department of the movie industry at
different times.2361 Impressive works of early Soviet motion cinematography
were certainly a Jewish contribution. The Jewish Encyclopedia lists numerous
administrators, producers, directors, actors, script writers and motion picture
theorists. Producer Dziga Vertov is considered a classic figure in Soviet,
cinema, mostly nonfiction. His works includeLenins Truth, Go
Soviets, Symphony of Donbass [the Donetsk Basin], and The Three Songs about
Lenin.2362 (It is less known that he also orchestrated desecration of the holy
relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh.) In the documentary genre, Esther Shub, by
tendentious cutting and editing of fragments of old documentaries, produced
full-length propaganda movies (The Fall of Romanovs (1927) and others), and
later glorifying ones. Other famous Soviet names include S. Yutkevitch, G.
Kozintsev and L. Trauberg (SVD, New Babel). F. Ermler organized the
Experimental Movie Studio. Among notable others are G. Roshal (The
Skotinins), Y. Raizman (Hard Labor Camps, Craving of Earth among others.).
By far, the largest figure of Soviet cinematography was Sergei Eisenstein. He
introduced the epic spirit and grandeur of huge crowd scenes, tempo, new
techniques of editing and emotionality into the art of cinematography.2363
However he used his gifts as ordered. The worldwide fame of Battleship
Potemkin was a battering ram for the purposes of the Soviets and in its
irresponsibly falsified history encouraged the Soviet public to further curse
Tsarist Russia. Made-up events, such as the massacre on Odessa Steps scene
and the scene where a crowd of rebellious seamen is covered with tarpaulin for
execution, entered the worlds consciousness as if they were facts. First it was
necessary to serve Stalins totalitarian plans and then his nationalistic idea.
Eisenstein was there to help.
Though the Jewish Encyclopedia list names in the arts by nationality, I
must repeat: not in the nationalism does one find the main key to the epoch of
the early Soviet years, but in the destructive whirlwind of internationalism,
estranged from any feeling of nationality or traditions. And here in theater but
close to authorities we see the glorious figure of Meyerhold, who became the
leading and most authoritarian star of the Soviet theater. He had numerous

2361, . 4, . 275, , . 3, . 439.

2362, . 1, . 653.
2363, . 4, . 276-277.
impassioned admirers but wasnt universally recognized. From late
recollections of Tyrkova-Vyazemskaya, Meyerhold appears as a dictator
subjugating both actors and playwrites alike to his will by his dogmatism and
dry formalism. Komissarzhevskaya sensed that his novelty lacks creative
simplicity and ethical and esthetical clarity. He clipped actors wings paid
more attention to frame than to portrait.2364 He was a steady adversary of
Mikhail Bulgakov.
Of course, the time was such that artists had to pay for their privileges.
Many paid, including Kachalov, Nemirovitch-Danchenko and A. Tairov-
Kornblit, the talented producer of the Chamber Theater and a star of that unique
early Soviet period. (In 1930, Tairov denounced Prompartia in the party
newspapers.)
Artist Marc Chagall emigrated by 1923. The majority of artists in the 20s
were required to contribute to Soviet mass propaganda. There some Jewish
artists distinguished themselves, beginning with A. Lisitsky who greeted the
revolution as a new beginning for humanity. He joined a number of various
committees and commissions, made first banner of all-Russian Central
Executive Committee, which was displayed on the Red Square in 1918 by
members of government. He made famous poster Strike Whites with the Red
Wedge, designed numerous Soviet expositions abroad (from 1927) and
propaganda albums for the West (USSR Builds Socialism etc.).2365 A favorite
with the authorities was Isaac Brodsky who drew portraits of Lenin, Trotsky and
others including Voroshilov, Frunze and Budenny. After completing his portrait
of Stalin he became the leading official portrait artist of the USSR in 1928 and
in 1934 was named director of the all-Russian Academy of Arts.2366
During early years after revolution, Jewish musical life was particularly
rich. At the start of century the first in the world Jewish national school of
music in the entire world, which combined both traditional Jewish and
contemporary European approaches, was established. The 1920s saw a number
of works inspired by traditional Jewish themes and stories, such asYouth of
Abraham by M. Gnesin, The Song of Songs by A, Krein, and Jewish Rhapsody
by his brother G. Krein. In that age of restrictions, the latter and his son Yulian
were sent into eight-years studying trip to Vienna and Paris to perfect Yulians
performance.2367 Jews were traditionally talented in music and many names of
future stars were for the first time heard during that period. Many
administrators from music appeared also, such as Matias Sokolsky-
Greenberg, who was chief inspector of music at Department of Arts of
Ministry of Education and a senior editor of ideological Music and
Revolution.Later in 1930s Moses Greenberg, a prominent organizer of
musical performances, was director of State Publishing House in music and

2364. -. // , -, 1990, 111, . 214-215.

2365, . 4, . 860-862.
2366, . 1, . 547.
2367, . 5, . 541-542; , . 2, . 86-87.
chief editor of the Department of Music Broadcasting at the State Radio
Studio.2368 There was Jewish Conservatory in Odessa as well.2369
Leonid Utesov (Lazar Vaysbeyn) thundered from the stage. Many of his
songs were written by A. dAktil. A. P. German and Y. Hayt wrote the March of
Soviet Aviation.2370 This was the origin of Soviet mass singing culture.
Year after year, the stream of Soviet culture fell more and more under the
hand of the government. A number of various state organizations were created
such as the State Academic Council, the monopolistic State Publishing House
(which choked off many private publishing firms and even had its own political
commissar, certain David Chernomordnikov in 1922-23,2371 and the State
Commission for Acquisition of Art Pieces (de facto power over artist
livelihood). Political surveillance was established. (The case of A. K. Glazunov,
Rector of the Leningrad Conservatory, will be reviewed below).
Of course, Jews were only a part of the forward triumphal march of
proletarian culture. In the heady atmosphere of the early Soviet epoch no one
noticed the loss of Russian culture and that Soviet culture was driving Russian
culture out along with its strangled and might-have-been names.

A vicious battle for the dominance within the Party was waged between Trotsky
and Stalin from 1923 to 1927. Later Zinoviev fought for first place equally
confident of his chances. In 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev, deceived by Stalin,
united with Trotsky (the United Opposition) that is, three of the most
visible Jewish leaders turned out on one side. Not surprisingly, many of the
lower rank Trotskyites were Jewish. (Agursky cites A. Chiliga, exiled with
Trotskyites in the Urals: indeed the Trotskyites were young Jewish intellectuals
and technicians, particularly from Left Bundists.2372
The opposition was viewed as principally Jewish and this greatly alarmed
Trotsky. In March of 1924 he complained to Bukharin that among the workers it
is openly stated: The kikes are rebelling! and he claimed to have received
hundreds of letters on the topic. Bukharin dismissed it as trivial. Then Trotsky
tried to bring the question of anti-Semitism to a Politburo session but no one
supported him. More than anything, Trotsky feared that Stalin would use
popular anti-Semitism against him in their battle for power. And such was
partially the case according to Uglanov, then secretary of the Moscow
Committee of the CP. Anti-Semitic cries were heard during Uglanovs
dispersal of a pro-Trotsky demonstration in Moscow November 7, 1927.2373

2368, .1, . 377.

2369, . 2, . 287.
2370, .1, . 288, 409.
2371, . 3, . 336.
2372. . -, . 240.
2373 , . 240-242, 244.
 Maybe Stalin considered playing the anti-Jewish card against the United
Opposition, but his superior political instinct led him away from that. He
understood that Jews were numerous in the party at that time and could be a
powerful force against him if his actions were to unite them against him. They
were also needed in order to maintain support from the West and would be of
further use to him personally. He never parted from his beloved assistant Lev
Mekhlis and from the Civil War at Tsaritsyn, his faithful aid Moses
Rukhimovitch.
But as Stalins personal power grew towards the end of the 20s the number
of Jews in the Soviet Apparatus began to fall off. It was no accident that he sent
Enukidze to take photographs among the Jewish delegates at a workers and
peasants conference during the height of the struggle for party dominance.2374
Yaroslavsky writes in Pravda: Incidents of anti-Semitism are the same
whether they are used against the opposition or used by the opposition in its
fight against the party. They are an attempt to use any weakness, any fissures
in the dictatorship of the proletariat there is nothing more stupid or
reactionary than to explain the roots of opposition to the dictatorship of the
proletariat as related to the nationality of this or that opposition group
member.2375 At the same Party Congress, the 25th, where the united
opposition was decisively broken, Stalin directed Ordzhonikidze to specifically
address the national question in his report to the Central Committee, as if in
defense Jews. (Statistics from the report were discussed earlier in this chapter.)
The majority of the apparatus is Russian, so any discussion of Jewish
dominance has no basis whatever.2376 At the 26th Party Congress in 1930 Stalin
declared Great Russian chauvinism to be the main danger of the national
question. Thus, at the end of the 20s Stalin did not carry out his planned purge
of the party and government apparatus of Jews, but encouraged their expansion
in many fields, places and institutions.
At the 25th Congress in December 1927, the time had come to address the
looming peasant question what to do with the presumptuous peasantry
which had the temerity to ask for manufactured goods in exchange for their
grain. Molotov delivered the main report on this topic and among the debaters
were the murderers of the peasantry Schlikhter and Yakovlev-Epstein. 2377 A
massive war against the peasantry lay ahead and Stalin could not afford to
alienate any of his reliable allies and probably thought that in this campaign
against a disproportionately Slavic population it would be better to rely on Jews
than on Russians. He preserved the Jewish majority in the Gosplan. The
commanding heights of collectivization and its theory included, of course,
Larin. Lev Kritzman was director of the Agrarian Institute from 1928. As
Assistant to the President of the Gosplan in 1931-33 he played a fateful role in

2374, 1927, 13 , . 2.
2375. . // , 1927, 12 , . 2.
2376, 1927, 11 , . 1.
2377 , 22 , . 2-4, 23 , . 4, 5.
the persecution of Kondratev and Chayanov. Yakov Yakovlev-Epstein took
charge of Peoples Commissariat of Agriculture in 1929. (Before that he worked
in propaganda field: he was in charge of Head Department of Political
Education since 1921, later in the agitprop division of Central Committee
and in charge of press division of Central Committee. His career in agriculture
began in 1923 when during the 13th Party Congress he drafted resolutions on
agricultural affairs.2378 And thus he led the Great Change, the imposition of
collectivization on millions of peasants with its zealous implementers on the
ground. A contemporary writer reports: for the first time ever a significant
number of young Jewish communists arrived in rural communities as
commanders and lords over life and death. Only during collectivization did the
characterization of the Jew as the hated enemy of the peasant take hold even
in those places where Jews had never been seen before.2379
Of course regardless of the percentage of Jews in the party and Soviet
apparatus, it would be a mistake to explain the ferocious anti-peasant plan of
communism as due to Jewish participation. A Russian could have been found in
the place of Yakovlev-Epstein thats sufficiently clear from our post-October
history.
The cause and consequences of de-Kulakization and collectivization were
not only social and economic: The millions of victims of these programs were
not a faceless mass, but real people with traditions and culture, cut off from
their roots and spiritually killed. In its essence, de-Kulakization was not a socio-
economic measure, but a measure taken against a nationality. The strategic blow
against the Russian people, who were the main obstacle to the victory of
communism, was conceived of by Lenin, but carried out after his death. In those
years communism with all its cruelty was directed mostly against Russians. It is
amazing that not everything has perished during those days. Collectivization,
more than any other policy of the communists, gives the lie to the conception of
Stalins dictatorship as nationalist, i.e., Russian.
Regarding Jewish role in collectivization, it is necessary to remember that
Jewish communists participated efficiently and diligently. From a third-wave
immigrant who grew up in Ukraine. I remember my father, my mother, aunts,
uncles all worked on collectivization with great relish, completing 5-year plans
in 4 years and writing novels about life in factories2380 [Translators note: a
mainstream Soviet literary genre in the 20s].
In 1927 Izvestia declared there is no Jewish question here. The October
revolution gave a categorical answer long ago. All nationalities are equal that
was the answer.2381 However when the dispossessors entering the peasant huts
were not just commissars but Jewish commissars the question still glowered in
the distance.
2378, . 2, . 93, . 3, . 497.
2379Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lugen: Rufiland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert. S. 84.
2380M. . // , 1981, 20-26
( 84), . 7.
2381. . // , 1927, 20 , . 3.
 At the end of the 20s writes S. Ettinger, in all the hardship of life in the
USSR, to many it seemed that Jews were the only group which gained from the
revolution. They were found in important government positions, they made up a
large proportion of university students, it was rumored that they received the
best land in the Crimea and have flooded into Moscow.2382
Half a century later, June 1980, at a Columbia University conference about
the situation of Soviet Jewry, I heard scholars describe the marginalized status
of Jews in the USSR and in particular how Jews were offered the choice of
either emigration or denying their roots, beliefs and culture in order to become
part of a denationalized society.
Bah! That was what was required of all peoples in the 20s under the threat
of the Solovki prison camp and emigration was not an alternative.
The golden era of the 20s cries out for a sober appraisal.
Those years were filled with the cruelest persecution based upon class
distinction, including persecution of children on account of the former life of
their parents a life which the children did not even see. But Jews were not
among thesechildren or parents.
The clergy, part of the Russian character, centuries in the making, was
hounded to death in the 20s. Though not majority Jewish, too often the people
saw Jews directing the special ecclesiastical departments of the GPU which
worked in this area.
A wave of trials of engineers took place from the end of the 20s through
the 30s. An entire class of older engineers was eliminated. This group was
overwhelmingly Russian with a small number of Germans.
Study of Russian history, archeology, and folklore were suppressed the
Russians could not have a past. No one from the persecutors would be accused
having their own national interest. (It must be noted that the commission which
prepared the decree abolishing the history and the philology departments at
Russian universities was made up Jews and non-Jews alike Goykhbarg,
Larin, Radek and Ropstein as well as Bukharin, M. Pokrovskii, Skvortsov-
Stepanov and Fritche. It was signed into existence by Lenin in March, 1921.)
The spirit of the decree was itself an example of nationalist hatred: It was the
history and language of the Great Russians that was no longer needed. During
the 20s the very understanding of Russian history was changed there was
none! And the understanding of what a Great Russian is changed there was
no such thing.
And what was most painful, we Russians ourselves walked along this
suicidal path. The very period of the 20s was considered the dawn of liberated
culture, liberated from Tsarism and capitalism! Even the word Russian, such
as I am Russian sounded like a counter-revolutionary cry which I well
remember from my childhood. But without hesitation everywhere was heard
and printed Russopyati! [Translators note: a disparaging term for ethnic
Russians.]
2382S. Ettinger // Bulletin on Soviet and East European Jewish Affairs, 1970, 5, p. 38-39.
 Pravda published the following in a prominent place in 1925 by V.
Aleksandrovsky (not known for any other contribution):
Rus! Have you rotted, fallen and died?
Well heres to your eternal memory
you shuffle, your crutches scraping along,
Your lips smeared with soot from icons,
over your vast expanses the raven caws,
You have guarded your grave dream.
Old woman blind and stupid2383
V. Bloom in Moscow Evening could brazenly demand the removal of
historys garbage from [city] squares: to remove Minin-Pozharsky monument
from the Red Square, to remove the monument to Russias thousand-year
anniversary in Novgorod and a statue of St. Vladimir on the hill in Kiev. Those
tons of metal are needed for raw material. (The ethnic coloring of the new
names has already been noted.)
Swept to glory by the political changes and distinguished by personal
shamelessness, David Zaslavsky demanded the destruction of the studios of Igor
Graybar used to restore ancient Russian art, finding that reverend artist fathers
were trying again to fuse the church and art.2384
Russias self-mortification reflected in the Russian language with the depth,
beauty and richness of meaning were replaced by an iron stamp of Soviet
conformity.
We have not forgotten how it looked at the height of the decade: Russian
patriotism was abolished forever. But the feelings of the people will not be
forgotten. Not how it felt to see the Church of the Redeemer blown up by the
engineer Dzhevalkin and that the main mover behind this was Kaganovich who
wanted to destroy St. Basils cathedral as well. Russian Orthodoxy was publicly
harassed by warrior atheists led by Gubelman-Yaroslavsky. It is truthfully
noted: That Jewish communists took part in the destruction of churches was
particularly offensive No matter how offensive the participation of sons of
Russian peasants in the persecution of the church, the part played by each non-
Russian was even more offensive.2385 This went against the Russian saying: if
you managed to snatch a room in the house, dont throw the God out.
In the words of A. Voronel, The 20s were perceived by the Jews as a
positive opportunity while for the Russian people, it was a tragedy.2386
True, the Western leftist intellectuals regarded Soviet reality even higher;
their admiration was not based on nationality but upon ideas of socialism. Who
remembers the lightening crack of the firing squad executing 48 food workers
for having caused the Great Famine (i.e., rather than Stalin): the wreckers in
the meat, fish, conserves and produce trade? Among these unfortunates were not
2383, 1925, 13 , . 3.
2384 : - . . 1*, . 15.
2385Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Ltigen: Rufiland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert. S. 79.
2386. . . 2- . -: -, 1981, .
120.
less than ten Jews.2387 What would it take to end the worlds enchantment with
Soviet power? Dora Shturman attentively followed the efforts of B. Brutskus to
raise a protest among Western intellectuals. He found some who would protest
Germans and rightists. Albert Einstein hotheadedly signed a protest, but then
withdrew his signature without embarrassment because the Soviet Union has
achieved a great accomplishment and Western Europe will soon envy you.
The recent execution by firing squad was an isolated incident. Also, from
this, one cannot exclude the possibility that they were guilty. Romain Rolland
maintained a noble silence. Arnold Zweig barely stood up to the communist
rampage. At least he didnt withdraw his signature, but said this settling of
accounts was an ancient Russian method. And, if true, what then should be
asked of the academic Ioffe in Russia who was prompting Einstein to remove
his signature?2388
No, the West never envied us and from those isolated incidents millions
of innocents died. Well never discover why this brutality was forgotten by
Western opinion. Its not very readily remembered today.
Today a myth is being built about the past to the effect that under Soviet
power Jews were always second class citizens. Or, one sometimes hears that
there was not the persecution in the 20s, that was to come later.2389
Its very rare to hear an admission that not only did they take part, but there
was a certain enthusiasm among Jews as they carried out the business of the
barbaric young government. The mixture of ignorance and arrogance which
Hannah calls a typical characteristic of the Jewish parvenu filled the
government, social and cultural elite. The brazenness and ardor with which all
Bolshevik policies were carried out whether confiscation of church property
or persecution of bourgeois intellectuals gave Bolshevik power in the 20s a
certain Jewish stamp.2390
In the 90s another Jewish public intellectual, writing of the 20s said : In
university halls Jews often set the tone without noticing that their banquet was
happening against the backdrop of the demise of the main nationality in the
country During the 20s Jews were proud of fellow Jews who had brilliant
careers in the revolution, but did not think much about how that career was
connected to the real suffering of the Russian people Most striking today is
the unanimity with which my fellow Jews deny any guilt in the history of 20th
century Russia.2391
How healing it would be for both nations if such lonely voices were not
drowned out because its true, in the 20s, Jews in many ways served the
Bolshevik Moloch not thinking of the broken land and not foreseeing the

2387, 1930, 22 , . 1, 3-4, 25 , . 1.

2388. . // 22, 1990, 73, . 126-144.
2389. . // 22, 1983, 29, . 54.
2390Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lugen: Rufiland und die Juden im20. Jahrhundert. S. 144-
145.
2391. . // , 1994, 11, . 244.
eventual consequences for themselves. Many leading Soviet Jews lost all sense
of moderation during that time, all sense of when it was time to stop.
 Chapter 19. In the 1930s

The 1930s were years of an intense industrialized spurt, which crushed the
peasantry and altered the life of the entire country. Mere existence demanded
adaptation and development of new skills. But through crippling sacrifices, and
despite the many absurdities of the Soviet organizational system, the horrible
epic somehow led to the creation of an industrialized power.
Yet the first and second five-year plans came into existence and were
carried out not through the miracle of spontaneous generation, nor as a result of
the simple violent round-up of large masses of laborers. It demanded many
technical provisions, advanced equipment, and the collaboration of specialists
experienced in this technology. All this flowed plentifully from the capitalist
West, and most of all from the United States; not in the form of a gift, of course,
and not in the form of generous help. The Soviet communists paid for all of this
abundantly with Russias mineral wealth and timber, with concessions for raw
materials markets, with trade areas promised to the West, and with plundered
goods from the Empire of the tsars. Such deals flowed with the help and
approval of international financial magnates, most of all those on Wall Street, in
a persistent continuation of the first commercial ties that the Soviet communists
developed on the American stock exchanges as early as during the Civil War.
The new partnership was strengthened by shiploads of tsarist gold and treasures
from the Hermitage.
But wait a second, were we not thoroughly taught by Marx that capitalists
are the fierce enemies of proletarian socialism and that we should not expect
help from them, but rather a destructive, bloody war? Well, its not that simple:
despite the official diplomatic non-recognition, trade links were completely out
in the open, and even written about in Izvestiya: American merchants are
interested in broadening of economic ties with the Soviet Union. 2392 American
unions came out against such an expansion (defending their markets from the
products of cheap and even slave Soviet labor). The Russian-American
Chamber of Commerce, created at that time, simply did not want to hear about
any political opposition to communism, or to mix politics with business
relations.2393
Anthony Sutton, a modern American scholar, researched the recently-
opened diplomatic and financial archives and followed the connections of Wall
2392Izvestiya, January 22, 1928, p. 1.
2393Izvestiya, January 26, 1928, p. 3.
Street with the Bolsheviks; he pointed to the amoral logic of this long and
consistent relationship. From as early as the Marburg plan at the beginning of
the 20th century, which was based on the vast capital of Carnegie, the idea was
to strengthen the authority of international finance, through global
socialization, for control and for the forced appeasement. Sutton
concluded that: International financiers prefer to do business with central
governments. The banking community least of all wants a free economy and de-
centralized authority. Revolution and international finance do not quite
contradict each other, if the result of revolution should be to establish a more
centralized authority, and, therefore, to make the markets of these countries
manageable. And there was a second line of agreement: Bolsheviks and
bankers shared an essential common platform internationalism.2394
In that light, the subsequent support of collective enterprises and the mass
destruction of individual rights by Morgan-Rockefeller was not surprising. In
justification of this support, they claimed in Senate hearings: Why should a
great industrial country, like America, desire the creation and subsequent
competition of another great industrial rival? 2395 Well, they rightly believed that
with such an obviously uncompetitive, centralized and totalitarian regime,
Soviet Russia could not rival America. Another thing is that Wall Street could
not predict further development of the Bolshevik system, nor its extraordinary
ability to control people, working them to the very bone, which eventually led to
the creation of a powerful, if misshapen, industry.
But how does this tie in with our basic theme? Because as we have seen,
American financiers completely refused loans to pre-revolutionary Russia due
to the infringement of the rights of Jews there, even though Russia was always a
profitable financial prospect. And clearly, if they were prepared to sacrifice
profits at that time, then now, despite all their counting on the Soviet markets,
the Morgan-Rockefeller Empire would not assist the Bolsheviks if the
persecution of the Jews was looming on horizon in the USSR at the start of the
1930s.
Thats just the point: for the West, the previously described Soviet
oppression of the traditional Jewish culture and of Zionists easily disappeared
under the contemporary general impression that the Soviet power would not
oppress the Jews, but on the contrary, that many of them would remain at the
levers of power.
Certain pictures of the past have the ability to conveniently rearrange in our
mind in order to soothe our consciousness. And today a perception has formed
that in the 1930s the Jews were already forced out of the Soviet ruling elite and
had nothing to do with the administration of the country. In the 1980s we see
assertions like this: in the Soviet times, the Jews in the USSR were practically

2394A. Sutton. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Moscow, 1998; p. 210, 212.
2395Ibid, p. 214, 215.
destroyed as a people; they had been turned into a social group, which was
settled in the large cities as a social stratum to serve the ruling class.2396
No. Not only far from serving, the Jews were to the large extent members
of the ruling class. And the large cities, the capitals of the constituent Soviet
republics, were the very thing the authorities bought off through improved
provisioning, furnishing and maintenance, while the rest of the country
languished from oppression and poverty. And now, after the shock of the Civil
War, after the War Communism, after the NEP and the first five-year plan, it
was the peace-time life of the country that was increasingly managed by the
government apparatus, in which the role of the Jews was quite conspicuous, at
least until 1937-38.
In 1936, at the 8th Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union, Molotov, on
orders from Stalin (perhaps to differ from Hitler in the eyes of the West)
delivered this tirade: Our brotherly feelings toward the Jewish people are
determined by the fact that they begat the genius and the creator of the ideas of
the communist liberation of Mankind, Karl Marx; that the Jewish people,
alongside the most developed nations, brought forth countless prominent
scientists, engineers, and artists [that undoubtedly had already manifested itself
in the Soviet 1930s, and will be even more manifest in the post-war years], and
gave many glorious heroes to the revolutionary struggle and in our country
they gave and are still giving new, remarkable, and talented leaders and
managers in all areas of development and defense of the Cause of
Socialism.2397
The italics are mine. No doubt, it was said for propaganda purposes. But
Molotovs declaration was appropriate. And the defense of the Cause of
Socialism during all those years was in the hands of the GPU, the army,
diplomacy, and the ideological front. The willing participation of so many Jews
in these organs continued in the early and mid-1930s, until 1937-38.
Here we will briefly review according to contemporary newspapers, later
publications, and modern Jewish encyclopedias the most important posts and
names that had emerged mainly in the 1930s. Of course, such a review,
complicated by the fact that we know nothing about how our characters
identified themselves in regard to nationality, may contain mistakes in
individual cases and can in no way be considered comprehensive.
After the destruction of the Trotskyite opposition, the Jewish
representation in the party apparatus became noticeably reduced. But that purge
of the supreme party apparatus was absolutely not anti-Jewish. Lazar
Kaganovich retained his extremely prominent position in the Politburo; he was
an ominously merciless individual and, at the same time, a man of notoriously
low proffessional level. (Nevertheless, from the mid-1930s he was the Secretary

2396A. Voronel // 22: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy

intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish
Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel (henceforth 22)]. Tel-Aviv, 1986, (50), p. 160.
2397Izvestiya, November 30, 1936, p. 2.
of the Central Committee, and simultaneously a member of the Organizational
Bureau of the Central Committee only Stalin himself held both these
positions at the same time). And he placed three of his brothers in quite
important posts. Mikhail Kaganovich was deputy chair of the Supreme Soviet
of the National Economy beginning in 1931; from 1937 he was narkom
(narodny komissar, that is, peoples commissar) of the defense industry; later
he simultaneously headed the aviation industry. Yuli Kaganovich, passing
through the leading party posts in Nizhniy Novgorod (as all the brothers did),
became deputy narkom of the foreign trade.2398 (Another, absolutely untalented
brother, was a big gun in Rostov-on-Don. It reminds me of a story by
Saltykov-Shchedrin, where one Vooz Oshmyanskiy tried to place his brother
Lazar in a profitable post). However, both the ethnic Russian opposition
factions, that of Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, and that of Syrtsov, Ryutin, and
Uglanov, were destroyed by Stalin in the beginning of the 1930s with support of
the Jewish Bolsheviks he drew necessary replacements from their ranks.
Kaganovich was the principal and the most reliable of Stalins supporters in the
Politburo: he demanded the execution of Ryutin (October 1932-January 1933)
but even Stalin wasnt able to manage it then.2399 The purge of 1930-1933 dealt
with the Russian elements in the party.
Out of 25 members in the Presidium of the Central Control Commission
after the 16th Party Congress (1930), 10 were Jews: A. Solts, the conscience of
the Party (in the bloodiest years from 1934 to 1938 was assistant to Vyshinsky,
the General Prosecutor of the USSR2400); Z. Belenky (one of the three above-
mentioned Belenky brothers); A. Goltsman (who supported Trotsky in the
debate on trade unions); ferocious Rozaliya Zemlyachka (Zalkind); M.
Kaganovich, another of the brothers; the Chekist Trilisser; the militant atheist
Yaroslavsky; B. Roizenman; and A.P. Rozengolts, the surviving assistant of
Trotsky. If one compares the composition of the partys Central Committee in
the 1920s with that in the early 1930s, he would find that it was almost
unchanged both in 1925 as well as after the 16th Party Congress, Jews
comprised around 1/6 of the membership.2401
In the upper echelons of the communist party after the 17th Congress (the
congress of the victors) in 1934, Jews remained at 1/6 of the membership of
the Central Committee; in the Party Control Commission around 1/3, and a
similar proportion in the Revision Commission of the Central Committee. (It
was headed for quite a while by M. Vladimirsky. From 1934 Lazar Kaganovich
took the reins of the Central Control Commission). Jews made up the same
proportion (1/3) of the members of the Commission of the Soviet Control. 2402

2398Rossiyskaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforth

RJE)]. 2nd Ed. Moscow, 1994. v.1, p. 527-528.
2399Robert Conquest. Bolshoy Terror [The Great Terror]. Firenze: Edizioni Aurora, 1974, p.
70, 73.
2400RJE, v. 3, p. 95.
2401Izvestiya, July 14, 1930, p. 1.
2402Izvestiya, February 11, 1934, p. 1-2.
For five years filled with upheaval (1934-1939) the deputy General Prosecutor
of the USSR was Grigory Leplevsky.2403
Occupants of many crucial party posts were not even announced in Pravda.
For instance, in autumn 1936 the Secretary of the Central Committee of
Komsomol (the Union of Communist Youth) was E. Fainberg.2404 The
Department of the Press and Publishing of the Central Committee the key
ideological establishment was managed by B. Tal. Previously, the department
was headed by Lev Mekhlis, who had by then shifted to managing Pravda full-
time; from 1937 Mekhlis became deputy narkom of defense and the head of
Political Administration of the Red Army.
We see many Jews in the command posts in provinces: in the Central Asia
Bureau, the Eastern Siberia Krai Party Committee (kraikom), in the posts of
first secretaries of the obkoms [party committee of oblasts] of the Volga German
Republic, the Tatar, Bashkir, Tomsk, Kalinin, and Voronezh oblasts and in many
others. For example, Mendel Khatayevich (a member of the Central Committee
from 1930) was consequently secretary of Gomel, Odessa, Tatar, and
Dnepropetrovsk obkoms, secretary of the Middle Volga kraikom, and second
secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Yakov Chubin was secretary of
the Chernigov and Akmolinsk obkoms and of the Shakhtinsk district party
committee; later he served in several commissions of the Party Control in
Moscow, Crimea, Kursk, and Turkmenia, and from 1937 he was the first
secretary of the Central Committee of Turkmenia. 2405 There is no need to list all
such names, but lets not overlook the real contribution of these secretaries into
the Bolshevik cause; also note their striking geographical mobility, as in the
1920s. Reliable cadres were still in much demand and indispensable. And there
was no concern that they lacked knowledge of each new locality of which they
took charge.
Yet much more power was in the hands of the narkoms. In 1936 we see
nine Jewish narkoms in the Government. Take the worldwide-famous narkom
of foreign affairs Litvinov (in the friendly cartoons in Izvestiya, he was
portrayed as a knight of peace with a spear and shield taking a stand against
foreign filth); no less remarkable, but only within the limits of the USSR, was
the narkom of internal affairs Yagoda; the ascending and all-glorious Iron
Narkom of railroads, Lazar Kaganovich; foreign trade was headed by A.
Rozengolts(before that we saw him in the Central Control Commission); I.Ya.
Weitser was in charge of domestic trade; M. Kalmanovich was in charge of
sovkhozes [state owned farms that paid wages] (he was the foods-commissar
from the end of 1917); I.E. Lyubimov was narkom of light industry; G.
Kaminskiy was narkom of healthcare, his instructive articles were often
published in Izvestiya; and the above-mentioned Z. Belenky was the head of the

2403RJE, v. 2, p. 163.
2404RJE, v. 3, p. 189.
2405Ibid., p. 283, 344.
Commission of the Soviet Control. 2406 In the same Government we can find
many Jewish names among the deputy narkoms in various peoples
commissariats: finance, communications, railroad transport, water, agriculture,
the timber industry, the foodstuffs industry, education, justice. Among the most
important deputy narkoms were: Ya. Gamarnik (defense), A. Gurevich (he
made a significant contribution to the creation of the metallurgical industry in
the country2407); Semyon Ginzburg, he was deputy narkom of heavy industry,
and later he became narkom of construction, and even later minister of
construction of military enterprises.2408
The famous Great Turning Point took place place from the end of 1929
to the beginning of 1931. Murderous collectivization lay ahead, and at this
decisive moment Stalin assigned Yakovlev-Epshtein as its sinister principal
executive. His portraits and photos, and drawings by I. Brodsky, were
prominently reproduced in newspapers then and later, from year to year.2409
Together with the already mentioned M. Kalmanovich, he was a member of the
very top Soviet of Labor and Defense (there was hardly anyone apart from
Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov in that organ). 2410 In
March of 1931, at the 6th Session of Soviets, Yakovlev reported on the progress
of collectivization about the development of sovkhozes and kolkhozes (that is,
the destruction of the way of life of the people). 2411 On this glorious path to the
ruination of Russia, among Yakovlevs collaborators, we can see deputy narkom
V.G. Feigin, members of the Board of the peoples commissariat of agriculture
M.M. Volf, G.G. Roshal, and other experts. The important organization, the
Grain Trust, was attached to the peoples commissariat of agriculture to pump
out grain from peasants for the state; the chairman of the board of directors was
M.G. Gerchikov, his portraits appeared in Izvestiya, and Stalin himself sent him
a telegram of encouragement.2412 From 1932 the Peoples Commissariat of
Sovkhozes and Kolkhozes with M. Kalmanovich at the helm was separated
from the peoples commissariat of agriculture.2413 From 1934 the chairman of
the national Soviet of Kolkhozes was the same Yakovlev-Epshtein.2414 The
chairman of the Commission of Purveyance was I. Kleiner (who was awarded
the Order of Lenin). During the most terrible months of collectivization, M.
Kalmanovich was deputy narkom of agriculture. But at the end of 1930 he was
transferred into the Peoples Commissariat of Finance as deputy narkom; he
also became chairman of the board of the Gosbank [The State Bank], for in

2406Izvestiya, January 18, 1936, p. 1 and February 6, 1936, p. 3.

2407RJE, V. 1, p. 394.
2408Ibid., p. 313.
2409See, for example: Izvestiya, June 12, 1930; March 14 and 17, 1931; January 6, 1934;
January 10 and February 21, 1936.
2410Izvestiya, December 25, 1930, p. 1.
2411Izvestiya, March 14, 1931, p. 3-4; March 17, p. 1-2.
2412Izvestiya, February 2, 1931, p. 4; May 30, p. 1.
2413Izvestiya, February 20, 1936, p. 4.
2414RJE, v. 3, p. 497.
monetary matters a strong will was also much needed. In 1936, Lev Maryasin
became chairman of the board of the Gosbank; he was replaced in that post by
Solomon Krutikov in 1936.2415
In November 1930 the Peoples Commissariat of Foreign Trade was
created, and A.P. Rozengolts served for seven years as its head. Jews comprised
one-third of its board members. Among them was Sh. Dvoylatsky, who
simultaneously served in the Central Commissions on Concessions; in 1934-
1936 he became the Soviet trade representative in France.2416 At the end of 1930
the Peoples Commissariat of Supply was created with A. Mikoyan at the helm;
on its board we see M. Belenky that is another, actually the fifth, man with
the surname Belenky encountered here; soon he himself became the narkom,
replacing Mikoyan. In general, in the Peoples Commisariats of Trade and
Supply, the Jewish component was higher than in the upper party echelons
from a quarter to a half. Still lets not overlook the Tsentrosoyuz (the
bureaucratic center of Soviet pseudo-cooperation). After Lev Khichuk in the
1920s, it was managed from 1931 to 1937 by I.A. Zelensky, whom we met
earlier as a member of the board of the peoples commissariat of foodstuffs.2417
Let me point it out once more: all these examples are for illustrative
purposes only. They should not be taken to create the impression that there were
no members of other nationalities on all those boards and in the presidiums; of
course there were. Moreover, all the above-mentioned people occupied their
posts only for a while; they were routinely transferred between various
important positions.
Lets look at transport and communications. First, railroads were managed
by M. Rukhimovich (his portraits could be found in the major newspapers of
the time2418); later he became narkom of defense industry (with M. Kaganovich
as his deputy), while the command over railroads was given to L.
Kaganovich.2419 There were important changes in the Coal Trust: I. Schwartz
was removed from the board and M. Deych was assigned to replace him. 2420 T.
Rozenoer managed Grozneft [Grozny Oil]. Yakov Gugel headed the
construction of the Magnitogorsk metallurgical giant; Yakov Vesnik was the
director of the Krivoy Rog Metallurgical industrial complex; and the hell of the
Kuznetsk industrial complex with its 200,000 hungry and ragged workers was
supervised by S. Frankfurt, and after him by I. Epshtein (the latter was arrested
in 1938 but landed on his feet because he was sent to take command over the
construction of the Norilsk industrial complex).2421

2415RJE, v. 2, p. 98, 256.

2416RJE, v. 1, p. 418.
2417Ibid., p. 483.
2418See, for example: Izvestiya, May 17, 1931, p. 3.
2419Izvestiya, December 9, 1936, p. 1.
2420Izvestiya, July 7, 1930, p. 2.
2421RJE, v.1, p. 222, 387; v. 3, p. 237, 464.
 The Supreme Soviet of the National Economy still existed, but its
significance waned. After Unshlikht, it was headed by A. Rozengolts, and then
by Ordzhonikidze, with Jews comprising the majority of its board.2422
At that time, the Gosplan [state planning ministry] gathered strength. In
1931, under the chairmanship of Kuibyshev, Jews comprised more than half of
its 18-member board.2423
Lets now examine the top posts in economy during the last burgeoning
year of Stalins era, 1936. In 1936 Izvestiya published2424 the complete roster of
the board of the peoples commissariat of domestic trade. Those 135 individuals
had essentially ruled over the entire domestic trade in the USSR (and they were
hardly disinterested men). Jews comprised almost 40% of this list, including
two deputies to the narkom, several trade inspectors, numerous heads of food
and manufactured goods trades in the oblasts, heads of consumer unions,
restaurant trusts, cafeterias, food supplies and storage, heads of train dining cars
and railroad buffets; and of course, the head of Gastronom No.1 in Moscow
(Eliseyevsky) was also a Jew. Naturally, all this facilitated smooth running of
the industry in those far from prosperous years.
In the pages of Izvestiya one could read headlines like this: The
management of the Unions Fishing Trust made major political mistakes. As a
result, Moisei Frumkin was relieved of his post at the board of the Peoples
Commissariat of Ddomestic Trade (we saw him in the 1920s as a deputy of the
Narkom of Foreign Trade). Comrade Frumkin was punished with a stern
reprimand and a warning; comrade Kleiman suffered the same punishment; and
comrade Nepryakhin was expelled from the party.2425
Soon after that, Izvestiya published2426 an addendum to the roster of the
Peoples Commissariat of Heavy Industry with 215 names in it. Those wishing
to can delve into it as well. A present-day author thus writes about those people:
by the 1930s the children of the dclass Jewish petty bourgeois succeeded
in becoming the commanders of the great construction projects. And so it
appeared to those who, putting in 16 hours a day for weeks and months, never
leaving the foundation pits, the swamps, the deserts, and taiga , that it was
their country.2427 However, the author is wrong: it was the blackened hard-
workers and yesterdays peasants, who had no respite from toiling in foundation
pits and swamps, while the directors only occasionally promenaded there; they
mainly spent time in offices enjoying their special provision services (the
bronze foremen). But undoubtedly, their harsh and strong-willed decisions
helped to bring these construction projects to completion, building up the
industrial potential of the USSR.

2422Izvestiya, November 14, 1930, p. 2; November 16, p. 4.

2423Izvestiya, February 13, 1931, p. 3.
2424Izvestiya, April 9, 1936, p. 2.
2425Izvestiya, November 5, 1930, p. 2; November 11, p. 5.
2426Izvestiya, June 11, 1936, p. 2.
2427V. Boguslavskiy. V zashchitu Kunyayeva [In Defense of Kunyayev] // 22, 1980, (16), p.
174.
 Thus the Soviet Jews obtained a weighty share of state, industrial, and
economic power at all levels of government in the USSR.

The personality of B. Roizenman merits particular attention. See for yourself:

he received the Order of Lenin in recognition of his exceptional services in
the adjustment of the state apparatus to the objectives of the large-scale
offensive for Socialism. What secrets, inscrutable to us, could be hidden
behind this offensive? We can glance into some of them from the more direct
wording: for carrying out special missions of top state importance on the clean-
up of state apparatus in the Soviet diplomatic missions abroad.2428
Now lets look at the state of affairs in diplomacy. The 1920s were
examined in the preceding chapter. Now we encounter other important people.
For example, in spring of 1930, Izvestiya reported on page 1 and under a
separate heading that F.A. Rotshtein, the board member of the Peoples
Commissariat of Internal Affairs, returned from vacation and resumed his
duties.2429 (Well, didnt they only write this way about Stalin? To the best of my
knowledge, neither Ordzhonikidze, nor Mikoyan other very top functionaries
was honored in such a way?) Yet very soon Rotshtein made a slip and his
career ended just two months later, in July 1930. With the designation of
Litvinov as narkom, Rotshtein was removed from the board (even though, we
may remember, he claimed credit for the creation of the British Communist
Party). In the 1930s, at the peak of Litvinovs power, a new generation
appeared. The Jewish Encyclopedia writes: there was a notion of the Litvinov
school of diplomacy that included the outstanding personalities of K.
Umansky, Ya. Surits, B. Shtein (he was already successful by the beginning of
the 1920s) and E. Gnedin (son of Parvus). 2430 Ehrenburg added here the name of
E. Rubinin. Just as in the 1920s diplomacy attracted a cadre of Jews, so it did
through the early and mid-1930s. From the moment the USSR was accepted
into the League of Nations, we see Litvinov, Shtein, Gnedin, and also Brenner,
Stashevsky, Marcus, Rozenberg, and Svanidze (a Georgian) as the senior
members of the Soviet delegation. It was these people who represented Soviet
Russia at that forum of nations. There were Soviet plenipotentiaries in Europe
of Jewish origin: in England Maisky; in Germany (and later in France)Ya.
Surits; in ItalyB. Shtein (after Kamenev); we also see Jewish
plenipotentiaries in Spain, Austria, Romania, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia,
Belgium, Norway, and in Asia. For example, the above-mentioned Surits
represented the Soviet Union in Afghanistan as early as the Russian Civil War;
later, from 1936, B. Skvirsky served in Afghanistan; for many years he was was

2428Izvestiya, April 24, 1931, p. 2.

2429Izvestiya, May 18, 1930, p. 1.
2430Kratkaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforthSJE)].
Jerusalem, 1976-2001. v. 4, p. 879.
the unofficial Soviet representative in Washington. 2431 In the early and mid-
1930s, a great number of Jews successfully continued to work in Soviet trade
delegations. (Here we find another Belenky, already the sixth individual of that
name, B.S.Belenky, who was the trade representative in Italy from 1934 to
1937).2432
Concerning the Red Army, the aforementioned Israeli researcher, Aron
Abramovich, writes that in the 1930s a significant number of Jewish officers
served in the army. There were many of them, in particular in the
Revolutionary Military Soviet, in the central administrations of the peoples
commissariat of defense, in the general staff, and at lower levels in the
military districts, in the armies, corps, divisions, brigades, and all military units.
The Jews still played a prominent role in the political organs. 2433 The entire
Central Political Administration of the Red Army came under command of the
trustworthy Mekhlis after the suicide of the trustworthy Gamarnik. Here are
several names from the cream of the Political Administration: Mordukh
Khorosh was the deputy director of the Political Administration of the Red
Army in the 1930s, and later, until his arrest, he was in charge of the Political
Administration of the Kiev military district. From 1929 through to 1937, Lazar
Aronshtam headed the political administration of the Belorussian military
district, then of the Special Far Eastern Army, and later of the Moscow
military district. Isaak Grinberg was the Senior Inspector of the Political
Administration of the Red Army, and later the deputy director of the Political
Administration of the Leningrad district. Boris Ippo (he participated in the
pacification of Central Asia during the Civil War as the head of the Political
Administration of the Turkestan Front and later of the Central-Asian district)
was the head of the political administration of the Caucasus Red Army; and
later the director of the Military Political Academy. The already-mentioned
Mikhail Landa from 1930 to 1937 was the chief editor of Krasnaya Zvezda
(The Red Star, the official newspaper of the Soviet military).Naum Rozovsky
was a military prosecutor since the Civil War; by 1936 he was the chief military
prosecutor of the Red Army.2434
Gamarnik remained the deputy to Voroshilov, the chairman of the
Revolutionary Military Soviet until 1934 (when the organization was
disbanded). In the 1930s, in addition to those named in the previous chapter,
among the heads of the central administrations of the Red Army, we encounter
the following individuals: Abram Volp (the head of the Administrative
Mobilization Administration; in the previous chapter he was identified as the
chief of staff of the Moscow military district), Semyon Uritsky (of the Military
Intelligence Administration, until 1937), Boris Feldman the head of the
2431RJE, v. 3, p. 58.
2432RJE, v. 1, p. 101.
2433Aron Abramovich. V reshayushchey voyne: Uchastie i rol evreyev SSSR v voyne protiv
natsizma [In the Deciding War: Participation and Role of Soviet Jews in the War against
Nazism]. 2nd Edition. Tel-Aviv, 1982. v.1, p. 61.
2434RJE, v. 1, p. 63, 376, 515; v. 2, p. 120, 491; v. 3, p. 300-301.
Central Personnel Administration, and Leontiy Kotlyar the head of the
Central Military Engineering Administration in the pre-war years. Among the
commanders of the branches of the military we find A. Goltsman, the head of
military aviation from 1932 (we already saw him in the Central Control
Commission, and as a union activist; he died in a plane crash). Among the
commanders of the military districts we again see Iona Yakir (Crimean district,
and later the important Kiev District), and Lev Gordon (Turkestan district). 2435
Although we have no data on Jewish representation in the lower ranks, there is
little doubt that when a structure (be it a political administration of the army, a
supply service, or a party or a commissariat apparatus) was headed by a Jew, it
was accompanied, as a rule, by a quite noticeable Jewish presence among its
staff.
Yet service in the army is not a vice; it can be quite constructive. So what
about our good old GPU-NKVD? A modern researcher, relying on archives,
writes: The first half of the 1930s was characterized by the increasingly
important role of Jews in the state security apparatus. And on the eve of the
most massive repressions the ethnic composition of the supreme command
of the NKVD [can be understood with the help of] the list of decorated
Chekists on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD.
The list of 407 senior officials published in the central press contained 56 Jews
(13.8%), and 7 Latvians (1.7%).2436
When the GPU was reformed into the NKVD (1934) with Yagoda at the
head, they twice published the names of the supreme commissars of the NKVD
(what a rare chance to peek behind a usually impenetrable wall! 2437):
commissars of State Security of the 1st Rank Ya.S. Agranov (the first deputy to
Yagoda), V.A. Balitsky, T.D. Deribas, G.E. Prokovev, S.F. Redens, L.M.
Zakovsky; of the 2nd Rank: L.N. Belskiy, K.V. Pauker (they were already
decorated in 1927 on the decennial of the Cheka), M.I. Gay, S.A. Goglidze, L.B.
Zalin, Z.B. Katsnelson, K.M. Karlson, I.M. Leplevsky, G.A. Molchanov, L.G.
Mironov, A.A. Slutsky, A.M. Shanin, and R.A. Pillyar. Of course, not all of
them were Jews but a good half were. So, the Jewish Chekists were still there;
they didnt leave, nor were they forced out of the NKVD, the same NKVD
which was devouring the country after the death of Kirov, and which later
devoured itself.
A.A. Slutsky was the director of the NKVDs foreign section; that is, he
was in charge of espionage abroad. His deputies were Boris Berman and
Sergey Shpigelglas. Pauker was a barber from Budapest, who connected with

2435RJE, v. 1, p. 244, 350; v. 2, p. 78; v. 3, p. 179, 206-207, 493-494. See also Aron
Abramovich. V reshayushchey voyne. [In the Deciding War], v. 1, p. 62.
2436L.Yu. Krichevsky. Evrei v apparate VChK-OGPU v 20-e gody [The Jews in the apparatus
of the Cheka-OGPU in the 1920s] // Evrei i russkaya revolyutsia: Materiali i issledovaniya
[Jews and the Russian Revolution: Materials and Research] Compiled by O.V. Budnitsky.
Moscow; Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1999, p. 343-344; see also Izvestiya, December 20, 1937, p.
2.
2437Izvestiya, November 27, 1935, p. 1; November 29, p. 1.
the communists while he was a Russian POW in 1916. Initially, he was in
charge of the Kremlin security and later became the head of the operations
section of the NKVD.2438 Of course, due to secrecy and the non-approachability
of these highly placed individuals, it is difficult to judge them conclusively.
Take, for instance, Naum (Leonid) Etingon, who orchestrated the murder of
Trotsky and was the organizer of the Cambridge Five espionage ring and who
oversaw the nuclear espionage after the war a true ace of espionage.2439
Or take Lev Feldbin (he used a catchy pseudonym of Aleksandr Orlov). A
prominent and long-serving Chekist, he headed the economic section of the
foreign department of GPU, that is, he supervised all foreign trade of the USSR.
He was a trusted agent, of those who were instructed in the shroud of full
secrecy on how to extract false confessions [from the victims]. Many [of the
NKVD investigators] ended up being subordinate to him. 2440 And yet he was
completely hidden from the public and became famous only later, when he
defected to the West. And how many such posts were there?
Or take Mikhail Koltsov-Fridlyand (the political advisor to the
Republican government of Spain)2441, who took part in some of the major GPU
adventures.
M. Berman was assigned as deputy to the Narkom of Internal Affairs Ezhov
within three days after the latter was installed on September 27, 1936. Still,
Berman remained the director of the GULag.2442 And along with Ezhov, came
his handymen. Mikhail Litvin, his long-time associate in the Central Committee
of the party, became the director of the personnel department of the NKVD; by
May 1937 he rose to the unmatched rank of director of the Secret Political
section of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD. In 1931-36,
Henrikh Lyushkov was the deputy director of that section; he deserted to Japan
in 1938 and was then killed by a Japanese bullet in 1945 by the end of the war
the Japanese did not want to give him back and had no option but shoot him. In
this way, we can extensively describe the careers of each of them. In the same
section, Aleksandr Radzivilovsky was an agent for special missions. Another
long-time Ezhov colleague, Isaak Shapiro, was Ezhovs personal assistant from
1934, and then he became the director of the NKVD Secretariat, and later was
the director of the infamous Special Section of the Main Directorate of State
Security of the NKVD.2443
In December 1936, among the heads of ten sections (for secrecy, designated
only by number) of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD, we see

2438Robert Conquest. Bolshoy terror [The Great Terror], p. 187.

2439RJE, v. 3, p. 473.
2440Aleksandr Orlov. From the introduction to the book Taynaya istoriya stalinskikh
prestupleniy [The Secret History of Stalins Crimes] // Vremya i my: Mezhdunarodny
zhurnal literatury i obshchestvennykh problem [Epoch and We: International Journal of
Literature and Social Problems (henceforth EW)]. New York, 1982, No.67, p. 202.
2441RJE, v. 2, p. 62.
2442Izvestiya, September 27, 1936, p. 1; September 30, p. 3. See also RJE, v. 1, p. 124.
2443RJE, v. 2, p. 187, 218, 432; v. 3, p. 358.
seven Jews: the Security section (section #1)K. Pauker; Counter-Intelligence
(3) L. Mironov; Special section (5)I. Leplevsky; Transport (6)A.
Shanin; Foreign section (7) A. Slutsky; Records and Registration (8)V.
Tsesarsky; Prisons (10)Ya. Veinshtok. Over the course of the meat-grinding
year of 1937 several other Jews occupied posts of directors of those sections: A.
ZalpeterOperations section (2); Ya. Agranov, followed by M. LitvinSecret
Political section (4); A Minaev-TsikanovskyCounter-Intelligence (3); and I.
Shapiro Special section (9).2444
I named the leadership of the GULag in my book, GULag Archipelago.
Yes, there was a large proportion of Jews among its command. (Portraits of the
directors of construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, which I reproduced
from the Soviet commemorative corpus of 1936, caused outrage: they claimed
that I have selected the Jews only on purpose. But I did not select them, Ive just
reproduced the photographs of all the High Directors of the BelBaltlag [White
Sea Baltic Canal camp administration] from that immortal book. Am I guilty
that they had turned out to be Jews? Who had selected them for those posts?
Who is guilty?) I will now add information about three prominent men, whom I
did not know then. Before the BelBaltlag, one Lazar Kogan worked as the head
of the GULag; Zinovy Katsnelson was the deputy head of the GULag from 1934
onward; Izrail Pliner was the head of the GULag from 1936, and later he
oversaw the completion of construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal (1937).2445
It cant be denied that History elevated many Soviet Jews into the ranks of
the arbiters of the fate of all Russians.

Never publicized information about events of different times flows from

different sources: about the regional Plenipotentiaries of GPU-NKVD in the
1930s (before 1937). The names of their offices fully deserved to be written in
capital letters, for it was precisely them and not the secretaries of the obkoms,
who were the supreme masters of their oblasts, masters of the life and death of
any inhabitant, who reported directly only to the central NKVD in Moscow. The
full names of some of them are known, while only initials remain from others;
and still of others, we know only their last names. They moved from post to
post, between different provinces. (If we could only find the dates and details of
their service! Alas, all this was done in secret). And in all of the 1930s, many
Jews remained among those provincial lords. According to the recently
published data, in the regional organs of State Security, not counting the Main
Directorate of State Security, there were 1,776 Jews (7.4% of the total members
serving).2446
2444A. Kokurin, N. Petrov. NKVD: struktura, funktsii, kadry [The NKVD: Organization,
Functions, Cadres] // Svobodnaya mysl [Free Thought], 1997, (6), p. 113-116.
2445RJE, v. 2, p. 22, 51-52, 389.
2446A. Kokurin, N. Petrov. NKVD: struktura, funktsii, kadry [The NKVD: Organization,
Functions, Cadres] // Svobodnaya mysl [Free Thought], 1997, (6), p. 118.
 A few Jewish plenipotentiaries are listed here: in Belorussia Izrail
Leplevsky (brother of the deputy General Prosecutor Grigory Leplevsky, we
already saw him in the Cheka; later, he worked in a senior post in the GPU as a
Commissar of State Security of 2nd Rank; and now we see him as the Narkom
of Internal Affairs of Belorussia from 1934 to 1936); in the Western Oblast
I.M. Blat, he later worked in Chelyabinsk; in the Ukraine Z. Katsnelson, we
saw him in the Civil War all around the country, from the Caspian Sea to the
White Sea. Now he was the deputy head of the GULag; later we see him as
Deputy Narkom of Internal Affairs of Ukraine; in 1937 he was replaced by
Leplevsky. We see D.M. Sokolinsky first In Donetsk Oblast and later in Vinnitsa
Oblast; L.Ya. Faivilovich and Fridberg in the Northern Caucasus; M.G. Raev-
Kaminsky and Purnis in Azerbaijan; G. Rappoport in Stalingrad Oblast;
P.Sh. Simanovsky in Orlov Oblast; Livshits in Tambov Oblast; G.Ya.
Abrampolsky in Gorkov Oblast; A.S. Shiyron, supervising the round-up of the
dispossessed kulaks in Arkhangel Oblast; I.Z. Ressin in the German Volga
Republic; Zelikman in Bashkiriya; N. Raysky in Orenburg Oblast; G.I.
Shklyar in Sverdlovsk Oblast; L.B. Zalin in Kazakhstan; Krukovsky in
Central Asia; Trotsky in Eastern Siberia, and Rutkovsky in the Northern
Krai.
All these high placed NKVD officials were tossed from one oblast to
another in exactly the same manner as the secretaries of obkoms. Take, for
instance, Vladimir Tsesarsky: was plenipotentiary of the GPU-NKVD in
Odessa, Kiev and in the Far East. By 1937 he had risen to the head of the
Special section of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD (just
before Shapiro). Or look at S. Mironov-Korol: in 1933-36 he was the head of
the Dnepropetrovsk GPU-NKVD; in 1937 he was in charge of the Western
Siberian NKVD; he also served in the central apparatus of the GPU-NKVD. 2447
In the mid-1930s, we see L. Vul as the head of Moscow and later of Saratov
Police. The plenipotentiary in Moscow was L. Belsky (after serving in Central
Asia); later, he had risen to the head of the Internal Service Troops of the
NKVD. In the 1930s we see many others: Foshan was in charge of the border
troops; Meerson was the head of the Economic Planning section of the NKVD;
L.I. Berenzon and later L.M. Abramson headed the finance department of the
GULag; and Abram Flikser headed the personnel section of the GULag. All
these are disconnected pieces of information, not amenable to methodical anal
Moreover, there were special sections in each provincial office of the NKVD.
Here is another isolated bit of information: Yakov Broverman was the head of
Secretariat of the Special Section of the NKVD in Kiev; he later worked in the
same capacity in the central NKVD apparatus.2448
Later, in 1940, when the Soviets occupied the Baltic states of Lithuania,
Latvia, and Estonia, the head of the Dvinsk NKVD was one Kaplan. He dealt so
harshly with the people there, that in 1941, when the Red Army had hardly left

2447RJE, v. 2, p. 293; v. 3, p. 311.

2448RJE, v. 1, p. 170.
and before the arrival of Germans, there was an explosion of public outrage
against the Jews.
In the novel by D.P. Vitkovsky, Half-life, there is a phrase about the Jewish
looks of investigator, Yakovlev (the action is set during Khrushchevs regime).
Vitovsky put it rather harshly so that Jews, who by the end of the 1960s were
already on the way of breaking away from communism and in their new
political orientation developed sympathy to any camp memoirs, were
nonetheless repulsed by such a description. I remember V. Gershuni asked me
how many other Jewish investigators did Vitovsky come across during his 30-
year-long ordeal?
What an astonishing forgetfulness betrayed by that rather innocent slip!
Would not it have been more appropriate to mention not the 30 years but 50
years, or, at least, 40 years? Indeed, Vitovsky might not have encountered many
Jewish investigators during his last thirty years, from the end of the 1930s
(though they could still be found around even in the 1960s). Yet Vitovsky was
persecuted by the Organs for forty years; he survived the Solovki camp; and he
apparently did not forget the time when a Russian investigator was a less
frequent sight than a Jewish or a Latvian one.
Nevertheless, Gershuni was right in implying that all these outstanding and
not so outstanding posts were fraught with death for their occupants; the more
so, the closer it was to 1937-38.

Our arbiters confidently ruled from their heights and when they were suddenly
delivered a blow, it must have seemed to them like the collapse of the universe,
like the end of the world. Wasnt there anyone among them before the onslaught
who reflected on the usual fate of revolutionaries?
Among the major communist functionaries who perished in 1937-38, the
Jews comprise an enormous percentage. For example, a modern historian writes
that if from 1 January 1935 to 1 January 1938 the members of this nationality
headed more than 50% of the main structural units of the central apparatus of
the peoples commissariat of internal affairs, then by 1 January 1939 they
headed only 6%.2449
Using numerous execution lists that were published over the recent
decades, and the biographical tomes of the modern Russian Jewish
Encyclopedia, we are able to trace to some degree the fates of those outstanding
and powerful Chekists, Red commanders, Soviet party officials, diplomats, and
others, whom we mentioned in the previous chapters of this book.
Among the Chekists the destruction was particularly overwhelming (the
names of those executed are italicized):

2449G.V. Kostirchenko. Taynaya politika Stalina: Vlast i antisemitizm [Stalins Secret Policy:
Power and Anti-semitism]. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya [International
Relations], 2001, p. 210.
 G.Ya. Abrampolsky; L.M. Abramson, died in prison in 1939; Yakov
Agranov, 1938;2450 Abram Belenky, 1941; Lev Belsky-Levin, 1941; Matvey
Berman, 1939; Boris Berman, 1939; Iosif Blat, 1937; Ya. Veinshtok, 1939;
Leonid Vul, 1938, Mark Gai-Shtoklyand, 1937; Semyon Gendin, 1939;
Benjamin Gerson, 1941; Lev Zadov-Zinkovsky, 1938; Lev Zalin-Levin, 1940; A.
Zalpeter, 1939; Lev Zakharov-Meyer, 1937; N.Zelikman, 1937; Aleksandr
Ioselevich, 1937, Zinovy Katsnelson, 1938; Lazar Kogan, 1939; Mikhail
Koltsov-Fridlyand, 1940; Georg Krukovsky, 1938; Izrail Leplevsky, 1938;
Natan Margolin, 1938; A. Minaev-Tsikanovsky, 1939; Lev Mironov-Kagan,
1938; Sergey Mironov-Korol, 1940; Karl Pauker, 1937; Izrail Pliner, 1939;
Mikhail Raev-Kaminsky, 1939; Aleksandr Radzivilovsky, 1940; Naum Raysky-
Lekhtman, 1939; Grigoriy Rappoport, 1938; Ilya Ressin, 1940; A. Rutkovsky;
Pinkhus Simanovsky, 1940; Abram Slutsky, poisoned in 1938; David
Sokolinsky, 1940; Mikhail Trilisser; Leonid Fayvilovich, 1936; Vladimir
Tsesarsky, 1940; A. Shanin, 1937; Isaak Shapiro, 1940; Evsey Shirvindt, 1938;
Grigoriy Shklyar; Sergey Shpigelglas, 1940; Genrikh Yagoda, 1938.
Nowadays entire directories, containing lists of the highest officials of the
Central Apparatus of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD who
fell during the Ezhovs period of executions and repressions, are published.
There we see many more Jewish names.2451
But only accidentally, thanks to the still unbridled glasnost that began in the
beginning of the 1990s, we learn about several mysterious biographies formerly
shrouded in secrecy. For example, from 1937, professor Grigory Mayranovsky,
a specialist in poisons, headed the Laboratory X in the Special Section of
Operations Technology of the NKVD, which carried out death sentences
through injections with poisons by the direct decision of the government in
1937-47 and in 1950; the executions were performed in a special prisoner cell
at Laboratory X as well as abroad even in the 1960s and 1970s. 2452
Mayranovsky was arrested only in 1951; from his cell he wrote to Beria:
Dozens of sworn enemies of the Soviet Union, including all kinds of
nationalists, were destroyed by my hand.2453 And from the astonishing
disclosure in 1990 we learned that the famous mobile gas chambers were
invented, as it turns out, not by Hitler during the World War II, but in the Soviet
NKVD in 1937 by Isai Davidovich Berg, the head of the administrative and
maintenance section of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast (sure, he was not alone in

2450The names of those executed and the year of execution are italicized throughout the text; in
other instances the date indicates the year of arrest; those who committed suicide on the eve
of arrest and those who died in custody are mentioned specifically.
2451See for example: NV. Petrov, K.V. Skorkin. Kto rukovodil NKVD: 1934-1941:
Spravochnik [Who Ran the NKVD: 1934-1941. Information Book]. Moscow: Zvenya,
1999.
2452Pavel Sudoplatov. Spetsoperatsii: Lubyanka i Kreml: 1930s-1950s [Special Operations:
Lubyanka [Prison] and the Kremlin: the 1930s through the 1950s]. Moscow: OLMA-Press,
1997, p. 440-441.
2453Izvestiya, May 16, 1992 p. 6.
that enterprise, but he organized the whole business). This is why it is also
important to know who occupied middle-level posts. It turns out, that I.D. Berg
was entrusted with carrying out the sentences of the troika of the NKVD of
Moscow Oblast; he dutifully performed his mission, which involved shuttling
prisoners to the execution place. But when three troikas began to work
simultaneously in the Moscow Oblast, the executioners became unable to cope
with the sheer number of executions. Then they invented a time-saving method:
the victims were stripped naked, tied, mouths plugged, and thrown into a closed
truck, outwardly disguised as a bread truck. On the road the exhaust fumes were
redirected into the prisoner-carrying compartment, and by the time the van
arrived to the burial ditch, the prisoners were ready. (Well, Berg himself was
shot in 1939, not for those evil deeds, of course, but for the anti-Soviet
conspiracy. In 1956 he was rehabilitated without any problem, though the story
of his murderous invention was kept preserved and protected in the records of
his case and only recently discovered by journalists)2454
There are so many individuals with outstanding lives and careers in the list
above! Bela Kun, the Butcher of Crimea, himself fell at that time, and with him
the lives of twelve Commissars of the communist government of Budapest
ended.2455
However, it would be inappropriate to consider the expulsion of Jews from
the punitive organs as a form of persecution. There was no anti-Jewish motif in
those events. (Notwithstanding, that if Stalins praetorians valued not only their
present benefits and power but also the opinion of the people whom they
governed, they should have left the NKVD and not have waited until they were
kicked out. Still, this wouldnt have spared many of them death, but surely it
would have spared them the stigma?) The notion of purposeful anti-Jewish
purge doesnt hold water: according to available data, at the end of the 1930s
the Jews were one of the few national minorities, belonging to which did not
constitute a crime for an NKVD official. There were still no regulations on
national and personnel policy in the state security agencies that was enforced
from the end of the 1940s to the early 1950s2456

Many Party activists fell under the destructive wave of 1937-1938. From
1936-37 the composition of the Soviet of Peoples Commissars began to change
noticeably as the purges during the pre-war years ran through the prominent
figures in the peoples commissariats. The main personage behind
collectivization, Yakovlev, had met his bullet; the same happened to his
2454E. Zhirnov. Protsedura kazni nosila omerzitelniy kharakter [A Horrible Execution] //
Komsomolskaya Pravda, October 28, 1990, p. 2.
2455Robert Conquest. Bolshoy Terror [The Great Terror], p. 797-798.
2456L.Yu. Krichevsky. Evrei v apparate VChK-OGPU v 20-e gody [The Jews in the apparatus
of the Cheka-OGPU in the 1920s] // Evrei i russkaya revolyutsia: Materiali i issledovaniya
[Jews and the Russian Revolution], p. 343, 344.
comrades-in-arms, Kalmanovich and Rukhimovich, and many others. The meat-
grinder devoured many old honored Bolsheviks, such as the long-retired
Ryazanov or the organizer of the murder of the Tsar Goloshchekin, not to
mention Kamenev and Zinovyev. (Lazar Kaganovich was spared although, he
himself was the iron broom in several purges during 1937-38; for example,
they called his swift purge of the city of Ivanov the Black Tornado.)2457
They offer us the following interpretation: This is a question about the
victims of the Soviet dictatorship; they were used by it and then mercilessly
discarded when their services became redundant.2458 What a great argument! So
for twenty years these powerful Jews were really used? Yet werent they
themselves the zealous cogs in the mechanism of that very dictatorship right up
to the very time when their services became redundant? Did not they make
the great contribution to the destruction of religion and culture, the
intelligentsia, and the multi-million peasantry?
A great many Red Army commanders fell under the axe. By the summer
of 1938 without exception all commanders of military districts who
occupied these posts by June 1937 disappeared without a trace. The Political
Administration of the Red Army suffered the highest losses from the terror
during the massacre of 1937, after the suicide of Gamarnik. Of the highest
political officers of the Red Army, death claimed all 17 army commissars, 25
out of 28 corps commissars, and 34 out of 36 brigade (divisional)
commissars.2459 We see a significant percentage of Jews in the now-published
lists of military chiefs executed in 1937-38.2460
Grigory Shtern had a very special military career; he advanced along the
political officers path. During the Civil War he was military commissar at
regimental, brigade, and divisional levels. In 1923-25 he was the head of all
special detachments in the Khorezm [a short-lived republic after the Bolshevik
revolution] troops during the suppression of rebellions in Central Asia. Until
1926, he was the head of the political administration division. Later he studied
at the military academy for senior military officers [and thus became eligible for
proper military posts]; in 1929-34 he was a military advisor to the Republican
government in Spain (not to be confused with Manfred Shtern, who also
distinguished himself among the Red Spaniards under the alias of General
Kleber). Later he was the Chief of Staff of the Far Eastern Front and conducted
bloody battles at Lake Khasan in 1938 together with Mekhlis, at the same time
conspiring against Marshall Blcher, whom he ruined and whose post of the
front commander he took over after the arrest of the latter. In March 1939, at the
18th Party Congress, he made this speech: Together we have destroyed a bunch
of good-for-nothings the Tukhachevskys, Gamarniks, Uborevichs [former
2457Robert Conquest. Bolshoy Terror [The Great Terror], p. 459.
2458Yu. Margolin. Tel-Avivskiy bloknot [Tel-Aviv Notebook] // Novoe Russkoe Slovo [The New
Russian Word], New York, August 5, 1968.
2459Robert Conquest. Bolshoy Terror [The Great Terror], p. 427-428, 430.
2460See for example: O.F. Suvenirov. Tragediya RKKA: 1937-1938. [The Tragedy of the Red
Army: 1937-1938] Moscow, Terra, 1998.
Soviet Marshalls[ and similar others. Well, he himself was shot later, in
autumn 1941.2461 Shterns comrade-in-arms in aviation, Yakov Smushkevich,
also had a head-spinning career. He too began as a political officer (until the
mid-1930s); then he studied at the academy for top officers. In 1936-37 he had
also fought in Spain, in aviation, and was known as General Douglas. In 1939
he was commander of the aviation group at Khalkhin Gol [on the Manchurian-
Mongolian border, site of Soviet-Japanese battles won by the Russians]. After
that he rose to the commander of all air forces of the Red Army the General
Inspector of the Air Force; he was arrested in May 1941 and executed in the
same year.2462
The wave of terror spared neither administrators, nor diplomats; almost all
of the diplomats mentioned above were executed.
Lets name those party, military, diplomatic, and managerial figures whom
we mentioned before on these pages who now were persecuted (the names of
the executed are italicized):
Samuil Agursky, arrested in 1938; Lazar Aronshtam, 1938; Boris Belenky,
1938; Grigory Belenky, 1938; Zakhar Belenky,1940; Mark Belenky, 1938;
Moris Belotsky, 1938; German Bitker, 1937; Aron Vainshtein, 1938; Yakov
Vesnik, 1938; Izrail Veitser, 1938; Abram Volpe, 1937; Yan Gamarnik,
committed suicide in 1937; Mikhail Gerchikov, 1937; Evgeny Gnedin, arrested
in 1939; Philip Goloshchekin, 1941; Ya. Goldin, 1938; Lev Gordon, arrested in
1939; Isaak Grinberg, 1938; Yakov Gugel, 1937; Aleksandr Gurevich, 1937;
Sholom Dvoilatsky, 1937; Maks Deych, 1937; Semyon Dimanshtein, 1938; Efim
Dreitser, 1936; Semyon Zhukovsky, 1940; Samuil Zaks, 1937; Zinovy Zangvil,
Isaak Zelensky, 1938; Grigory Zinovyev, 1936; S. Zorin-Gomberg, 1937; Boris
Ippo, 1937; Mikhail Kaganovich, committed suicide in expectation of arrest,
1941; Moisey Kalmanovich, 1937; Lev Kamenev, 1936; Abram Kamensky,
1938; Grigoriy Kaminsky, 1938; Ilya Kit-Viytenko, arrested in 1937 and spent
20 years in camps; I.M. Kleiner, 1937; Evgeniya Kogan, 1938; Aleksandr
Krasnoshchyokov-Tobinson, 1937; Lev Kritsman, 1937; Solomon Kruglikov,
1938; Vladimir Lazarevich, 1938; Mikhail Landa, 1938; Ruvim Levin, 1937;
Yakov Livshits, 1937; Moisey Lisovsky, arrested in 1938; Frid Markus, 1938;
Lev Maryasin, 1938; Grigory Melnichansky, 1937; Aleksandr Minkin-Menson,
died in camp in 1955; Nadezhda Ostrovskaya, 1937; Lev Pechersky, 1937; I.
Pinson, 1936; Iosif Pyatnitsky-Tarshis, 1938; Izrail Razgon, 1937; Moisey
Rafes, 1942; Grigory Roginsky, 1939; Marsel Rozenberg, 1938; Arkady
Rozengolts, 1938; Naum Rozovsky, 1942; Boris Royzenman, 1938; E. Rubinin,
spent 15 years in camps; Yakov Rubinov, 1937; Moisey Rukhimovich, 1938;
Oskar Ryvkin, 1937; David Ryazanov, 1938; Veniamin Sverdlov, 1939; Boris
Skvirsky, 1941; Iosif Slavin, 1938; Grigoriy Sokolnikov-Brilliant, killed in
2461RJE, v. 3, p. 430. See also Aron Abramovich. V reshayushchey voyne. [In the Deciding
War], v. 1, p. 66. See also V. Katuntsev, I. Kots. Intsident: Podopleyka Khasanskikh sobitiy
[The Incident: the Causes of the Lake Khasan Conflict] // Rodina, 1991, (6), p. 17.
2462RJE, v. 3, p. 82. See also Aron Abramovich, V reshayushchey voyne. [In the Deciding War]
v. 1, p. 64-66.
prison, 1939; Isaak Solts, died in confinement in 1940; Naum Sokrin, 1938; Lev
Sosnovsky, 1937; Artur Stashevsky-Girshfeld, 1937; Yury Steklov-Nakhamkis,
1941; Nikolay Sukhanov-Gimmer, 1940; Boris Tal, 1938; Semyon Turovsky,
1936; Semyon Uritsky, 1937; Evgeny Fainberg, 1937; Vladimir Feigin, 1937;
Boris Feldman, 1937; Yakov Fishman, arrested in 1937; Moisey Frumkin,
1938; Maria Frumkina-Ester, died in camp, 1943; Leon Khaikis, 1938; Avenir
Khanukaev; Moisey Kharitonov, died in camp, 1948; Mendel Khataevich,
1937; Tikhon Khvesin, 1938; Iosif Khodorovsky, 1938; Mordukh Khorosh,
1937; Isay Tsalkovich, arrested in 1937; Efim Tsetlin, 1937; Yakov Chubin; N.
Chuzhak-Nasimovich; Lazar Shatskin, 1937; Akhiy Shilman, 1937; Ierokhim
Epshtein, arrested in 1938; Iona Yakir, 1937; Yakov Yakovlev-Epshtein, 1938;
Grigory Shtern, 1941.
This is indeed a commemoration roster of many top-placed Jews.
Below are the fates of some prominent Russian Jewish socialists, who did
not join the Bolsheviks or who even struggled against them.
Boris Osipovich Bogdanov (born 1884) was an Odessan, the grandson and
son of lumber suppliers. He graduated from the best commerce school in
Odessa. While studying, he joined Social Democrat societies. In June 1905, he
was the first civilian who got on board the mutinous battleship, Potemkin, when
she entered the port of Odessa; he gave a speech for her crew, urging sailors to
join Odessas labor strike; he delivered letters with appeals to consulates of the
European powers in Russia. He avoided punishment by departing for St.
Petersburg where he worked in the Social Democratic underground; he was a
Menshevik. He was sentenced to two 2-year-long exiles, one after another, to
Solvychegodsk and to Vologda. Before the war, he entered the elite of the
Menshevik movement; he worked legally on labor questions. In 1915 he
became the secretary of the Labor Group at the Military Industrial Committee,
was arrested in January 1917 and freed by the February Revolution. He was a
member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers
Deputies of Petrograd, and regularly chaired its noisy sessions which attracted
thousands of people. From June 1917 he was a member of the Bureau of the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee and persistently opposed ongoing
attempts of the Bolsheviks to seize power. After the failed Bolshevik rebellion
in July 1917 he accepted the surrender of the squad of sailors besieged in the
Petropavlovsk Fortress. After the October coup, in 1918 he was one of the
organizers of anti-Bolshevik workers movement in Petrograd. During the Civil
War he lived in Odessa. After the Civil War he tried to restart the Menshevik
political activity, but at the end of 1920 he was arrested for one year. That was
the beginning of many years of unceasing arrests and sentences, exiles and
camps, and numerous transfers between different camps the so-called Great
Road of so many socialists in the USSR. And all that was just for being a
Menshevik in the past and for having Menshevik convictions even though by
that time he no longer engaged in politics and during brief respites simply
worked on economic posts and just wanted a quiet life; however, he was
suspected of economic sabotage. In 1922 he requested permission to
emigrate, but shortly before departure was arrested again. First he was sent to
the Solovki prison camp and later exiled to the Pechora camp [in the Urals]; his
sentences were repeatedly extended by three years; he experienced solitary
confinement in the Suzdal camp and was repeatedly exiled. In 1931 they
attempted to incriminate him in the case of the All-Soviet Bureau of
Mensheviks, but he was lucky and they left him alone. Yet he was hauled in
again in 1937, imprisoned in the Omsk jail (together with already-imprisoned
communists), where he survived non-stop interrogations which sometimes
continued without a pause for weeks, at any time of the day or night (there were
three shifts of investigators); he served out 7 years in the Kargopol camp
(several other Mensheviks were shot there); later he was exiled to Syktyvkar; in
1948 he was again sentenced and exiled to Kazakhstan. In 1956 he was
rehabilitated; he died in 1960, a worn-out old man.
Boris Davidovich Kamkov-Kats (born 1885) was the son of a country
doctor. From adolescence, he was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary
Party. Exiled in 1905 to the Turukhan Krai, he escaped. Abroad, he graduated
from the Heidelberg University School of Law. He was a participant in the
Zimmerwald [Switzerland] Conference of socialists (1915). After the February
Revolution he returned to Russia. He was one of the founders of the Left
Socialist Revolutionary Party; at the time of the October coup he entered into a
coalition with the Bolsheviks. He took part in the dispersal of the Russian
Constituent Assembly in January 1918. From April he urged breaking the
alliance with the Bolsheviks; in June he already urged a revolutionary uprising
against them. After the failed rebellion of the Socialist Revolutionaries, he went
underground. After a brief arrest in 1920, he was arrested again in 1921, and
exiled in 1923. Between exiles he spent two years in prison and experienced the
same Great Road. In 1933 he was exiled to Archangel; he was arrested again
in 1937 and executed in 1938.
Abram Rafailovich Gots (born 1882) was the grandson of a millionaire tea
merchant, V.Ya. Visotsky. From the age of 14, he was in the the Socialist
Revolutionary movement from the very creation of the SR party in 1901 (his
brother Mikhail was the party leader). From 1906, he was a terrorist, a member
of the militant wing of the SRs. From 1907-1915 he was in hard labor camps;
he spent some time sitting in the infamous Aleksandrovsky Central. He was a
participant of the February Revolution in Irkutsk and later in Petrograd. He was
a member of the executive committees of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers
Deputies of Petrograd and of the Soviet Peasants Deputies and a member of the
Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. From 25 October
1917 he headed the anti-Bolshevik Committee for the Salvation of the
Motherland and Revolution. During the Civil War he continued his struggle
against Bolsheviks. In 1920 he was arrested; at the trial of the Socialist
Revolutionaries in 1922 he was sentenced to death, commuted to 5 years of
imprisonment. Later he experienced the Great Road of endless new prison
terms and exiles. In 1939 he was sentenced to 25 years in the camps and died in
one a year later.
Mikhail Yakovlevich Gendelman (born 1881) was an attorney-at-law and a
Socialist Revolutionary from 1902. He participated in the February Revolution
in Moscow, was a member of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of
Soldiers and Workers Deputies, a member of the Presidium of the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee, and a member of the Central Committee of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party. On 25 October 1917, he left the meeting of the
2nd All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in protest against the Bolsheviks. He
was elected to the Constituent Assembly and participated in its only session, on
5 January 1918. Later in Samara he participated in the Committee of Members
of the Constituent Assemby. He was arrested in 1921; in 1922 he was sentenced
to death at the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, commuted to 5 years in
prison. After numerous prison terms and exiles, he was shot in 1938.
Mikhail Isaakovich Liber-Goldman (born 1880) was one of the founders of
the Bund (1897), a member of the Central Committee of the [General Jewish
Labor] Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia in Emigration; he represented the
Bund at the congresses of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. He
participated in the revolution of 1905-06. In 1910 he was exiled for three years
to Vologda Province, fled soon thereafter and emigrated again. He was a steady
and uncompromising opponent of Lenin. He returned to Russia after 1914, and
joined the Socialist Defender movement (Defense of the Motherland in
War). After the February revolution, he was a member of the Executive
Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Soldiers and Workers Deputies, and later
he was a member of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee. (He left the latter post after the October coup). Then he briefly
participated in the Social Democratic Workers Party of the Mensheviks. He
worked on economic positions andwas one of the leaders of the Menshevik
underground in the USSR. His Great Road arrests and exiles began in1923.
He was arrested again and executed in Alma-Ata in 1937.
For many, there was a similar fate, with repeated sentences and exiles, right
up to the climax of 1937-38.
Yet in those years purges swept all over the country, destroying the lives of
countless ordinary people, including Jews, people who had nothing to do with
politics or authority. Here are some of the Jews who perished:
Nathan Bernshtein (born 1876) a music scholar and critic; he taught the
history of music and aesthetics and wrote a number of books; arrested in 1937,
he died in prison.
Matvei Bronshtein (born 1906) a talented theoretical physicist, Doctor of
Science, who achieved extraordinary results. He was the husband of Lyudmila
K. Chukovskaya. Arrested in 1937, he was executed in 1938.
Sergey Ginter (born 1870) an architect and engineer; arrested in 1934,
exiled to Siberia, arrested again in 1937 and executed.
 Veniamin Zilbermints (born 1887) a mineralogist and geochemist; specialist
on rare elements, he laid the foundation for semi-conductor science; he was
persecuted in 1938.
Mikhail Kokin (born 1906) an Orientalist, Sinologist and historian, arrested
in 1937 and executed.
Ilya Krichevsky (born 1885) a microbiologist, immunologist (also trained
in physics and mathematics), Doctor of Medical Sciences, founder of a
scientific school, chairman of the National Association of Microbiologists;
arrested in 1938 and died in 1943.
Solomon Levit (born 1894), geneticist; he studied the role of heredity and
environment in pathology. Arrested in 1938 and died in prison.
Iokhiel Ravrebe (born 1883), an Orientalist, Judaist, one of the founders of
the reestablished Jewish Ethnographic Society in 1920. Accused of creating a
Zionist organization, he was arrested in 1937 and died in prison.
Vladimir Finkelshtein (born 1896), a chemical physicist, professor,
corresponding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; he had many
works in applied electrical chemistry; persecuted in 1937.
Ilya Khetsrov (born 1887), a hygienist and epidemiologist; he studied
environmental hygiene, protection of water resources, and community hygiene.
Arrested in 1938 and executed.
Nakhum Schwartz (born 1888), a psychiatrist, studied Jewish psychology.
In 1921-23 he taught Hebrew and wrote poetry in Hebrew. Accused of Zionist
activity, he was arrested in 1937 and later died in prison.
Here are the fates of the three brothers Shpilrein from Rostov-on-Don. Jan
(born 1887) was a mathematician; he applied mathematical methods in
electrical and heat engineering, he was professor at the Bauman Moscow State
Technical University and later the dean of its Electrical Engineering
Department. He was persecuted and died in 1937. Isaak (born 1891) was a
psychologist, Doctor of Philosophy. In 1927 he became the head of the All-
Russian Society of Psychotechnology and Applied Psychophysiology; he
performed extensive psychological analysis of professions and optimization of
working environment. He was arrested in 1935 and later executed. Emil (born
1899) was a biologist, the dean of the Biology Department of Rostov
University. He was shot in 1937.
Leonid Yurovsky (born 1884) Doctor of Political Economy, one of the
authors of the monetary reform of 1922-24. A close friend to A.V. Chayanov
and N.D. Kondratev [prominent Russian scientists], he was arrested in 1930,
freed in 1935, then arrested again in 1937 and executed.

Despite the overwhelming percentage of high-placed, aristocratic Jews, who

fell under Stalins axe, the free Western press did not perceive the events as
specifically the persecution of Jews: the Jews were massacred simply because
of their abundance in the top tiers of the Soviet hierarchy. Indeed, we read such
a stipulation in the collection of works Evreysky Mir [The Jewish World]
(1939): No doubt that the Jews in the USSR have numerous opportunities,
which they did not have before the revolution, and which they do not have even
now in some democratic countries. They can become generals, ministers,
diplomats, professors, the most high-ranking and the most servile aristocrats.
Opportunities but in no way rights, because of the absence of such rights,
Yakir, Garmanik, Yagoda, Zinovyev, Radek, Trotsky and the rest fell from
their heights and lost their very lives.2463 Still, no nationality enjoyed such a
right under the communist dictatorship; it was all about the ability to cling to
power.
The long-time devoted socialist, emigrant S. Ivanovich (S.O. Portugeis),
admitted: Under the Tsars, the Jews were indeed restricted in their right of
living; yet their right to live was incomparably greater then than under
Bolshevism. Indeed. However, at the same time, despite being perfectly aware
of collectivization, he writes that the awkward attempts to establish socialism
in Russia took the heaviest toll from the Jews; that the scorpions of
Bolshevism did not attack any other people with such brutal force as they
attacked Jews.2464
Yet during the Great Plague of dekulakization, it was not thousands but
millions of peasants who lost both their right of living and the right to live.
And yet all the Soviet pens (with so many Jews among them) kept complete
silence about this cold-blooded destruction of the Russian peasantry. In unison
with them, the entire West was silent. Could it be really out of the lack of
knowledge? Or was it for the sake of protecting the Soviet regime? Or was it
simply because of indifference? Why, this is almost inconceivable: 15 million
peasants were not simply deprived of entering the institutes of higher learning
or of the right to study in graduate school, or to occupy nice posts no! They
were dispossessed and driven like cattle out of their homes and sent to certain
death in the taiga and tundra. And the Jews, among other passionate urban
activists, enthusiastically took the reins of the collectivization into their hands,
leaving behind them persistent evil memory. And who had raised their voices in
defense of the peasants then? And now, in 1932-33, in Russia and Ukraine on
the very outskirts of Europe, five to six million people died from hunger! And
the free press of the free world maintained utter silence And even if we take
into account the extreme Leftist bias of the contemporary Western press and its
devotion to the socialist experiment in the USSR, it is still impossible not to
be amazed at the degree to which they could go to be blind and insensitive to
the sufferings of even tens of millions of fellow humans.
If you dont see it, your heart doesnt cry.
2463St. Ivanovich. Evrei i sovetskaya diktatura [The Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship] //
Evreyskiy Mir: Ezhegodnik na 1939 [Jewish World: Yearbook for 1939]. (henceforth
JW-1). Paris: Obedinenie russko-evreyskoy intelligentsii [Association of the Russo-Jewish
Intelligentsia], p. 43.
2464Ibid., p. 44-46.
 During the 1920s, the Ukrainian Jews departed from their pro-Russian-
statehood mood of 1917-1920, and by the end of the 1920s the Jews are among
Ukrainian chauvinists and separatists, wielding enormous influence therebut
only in the cities.2465 We can find such a conclusion: the destruction of
Ukrainian-language culture in 1937 was in part aimed against Jews, who
formed a genuine union with Ukrainians for the development of local culture
in Ukrainian language.2466 Nevertheless, such a union in cultural circles could
not soften the attitudes of the wider Ukrainian population toward Jews. We have
already seen in the previous chapter how in the course of collectivization a
considerable number of Jewish communists functioned in rural locales as
commanders and lords over life and death.2467 This placed a new scar on
Ukrainian-Jewish relations, already tense for centuries. And although the famine
was a direct result of Stalins policy, and not only in Ukraine (it brutally swept
across the Volga Region and the Urals), the suspicion widely arose among
Ukrainians that the entire Ukrainian famine was the work of the Jews. Such an
interpretation has long existed (and the Ukrainian migr press adhered to it
until the 1980s). Some Ukrainians are convinced that 1933 was the revenge of
the Jews for the times of Khmelnitsky.2468 [A 17th century Cossack leader who
conducted bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine].
Dont expect to reap wheat where the weed was sewn. The supreme
authority of so many Jews along with only a small number of Jews being
touched by the grievances which afflicted the rest of population could lead to all
sorts of interpretations.
Jewish authors who nervously kept an eye on anti-Semitism in the USSR
did not notice this trampled ash, however, and made rather optimistic
conclusions. For instance, Solomon Schwartz writes: From the start of the
1930s, anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union quickly abated, and in the mid-
1930s it lost the character of a mass phenomenon anti-Semitism reached the
all-time low point. He explains this, in part, as the result of the end of the NEP
(the New Economic Policy) and thereby the disappearance of Jewish
businessmen and petty Jewish merchants. Later, forced industrialization and
lightning-fast collectivization, which he favorably compares with a kind of
shock therapy, i.e., treatment of mental disorders with electric shocks, was of
much help. In addition he considers that in those years the ruling communist
circles began to struggle with Great-Russian chauvinism. (Well, they did not
begin; they just continued the policy of Lenins intolerance). Schwartz soundly
notes that the authorities were persistently silent about anti-Semitism, in

2465Pismo V.I. Vernadskogo I.I. Petrunkevichu ot 14 Iyunya 1927 [A letter from V.I. Vernadsky
to I.I. Petrunkevich of June 14, 1927] // Novy Mir [New World], 1989, (12), p. 220.
2466Mikhail Kheyfetz. Uroki proshlogo [Lessons of the Past] // 22, 1989, (63), p. 202.
2467Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lgen: Russland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin:
Siedler Verlag, 1992, S. 84.
2468M. Tsarinnik. Ukrainsko-evreyskiy dialog [Ukraino-Jewish Dialogue] // 22, 1984, (37),
p. 160.
order to avoid the impression that the struggle against Great-Russian
chauvinism is a struggle for the Jews.2469
In January 1931, first the New York Times,2470 and later the entire world
press published a sudden and ostentatious announcement by Stalin to the Jewish
Telegraph Agency: The Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot
help but be an irreconcilable and sworn enemy of anti-Semitism. In the USSR,
anti-Semitism is strictly prosecuted by law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to
the Soviet order. Active anti-Semites are punished, according to the laws of the
USSR, with the death penalty.2471 See, he addressed the democratic West and
did not mind specifying the punishment. And it was only one nationality in the
USSR that was set apart by being granted such a protection. And world opinion
was completely satisfied with that.
But characteristically, the announcement by the Leader was not printed in
the Soviet press (because of his cunning reservations); it was produced for
export and he hid this position from his own citizens; in the USSR it was only
printed at the end of 1936.2472 Then Stalin sent Molotov to make a similar
announcement at the Congress of Soviets.
A contemporary Jewish author, erroneously interpreting Molotovs speech,
suggests that speaking on behalf of the government he threatened to punish
anti-Semitic feelings with death.2473 Feelings! No, Molotov did not mention
anything like that; he did not depart from Stalins policy of persecuting active
anti-Semites. We are not aware of any instance of death penalty in the 1930s
for anti-Semitism, but people were sentenced for it according to the Penal Code.
(People whispered that before the revolution the authorities did not punish as
harshly even for libels against the Tsar.)
But now S. Schwartz observes a change: In the second half of the 1930s,
these sentiments [peoples hostility toward Jews] became much more prevalent
particularly in the major centers, where the Jewish intelligentsia and semi-
intelligentsia were concentrated. Here again the legend about Jewish
domination gradually began to come back to life, and they began to spread
exaggerated notions about the role of Jews in the middle and top ranks of
government. Well, whether or not it was really a legend, he immediately
attempted to explain it, though in a quite nave manner, suggesting the same old
excuse that the Jewish intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia simply had almost
no other source of livelihood under Soviet conditions except the government
service.2474

2469S.M. Schwartz. Antisemitizm v Sovetskom Soyuze [Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union].

New York: Chekovs Publishing House, 1952, p. 8, 98-99, 107-108.
2470New York Times, January 15, 1931, p. 9.
2471I.V. Stalin. Sochineniya (v 13 tomakh) [Written Works (in 13 volumes)]. M.: Gospolitizdat,
1946-1951. v. 13, p. 28.
2472Izvestiya, November 30, 1936, p. 2.
2473S. Pozner. Sovetskaya Rossiya [The Soviet Russia] // JW-1, p. 260.
2474S.M. Schwartz. Antisemitizm v Sovetskom Soyuze [Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union].
New York: Chekovs Publishing House, 1952,p. 118.
 This is so shameful to read. What oppression and despair! See, they had
almost no other sources of livelihood, only privileged ones. And the rest of
population was absolutely free to toil on kolkhoz fields, to dig pits, and to roll
barrows at the great construction projects of the 5-year plans
In official policy, nothing had changed in the 1930s in the Jewish Question
from the time of the revolution; no official hostility toward Jews existed.
Indeed, they used to dream and proclaim about the impending end of all
national conflicts.
And the foreign Jewish circles did not and could not sense any oppression
of the Jews in the USSR. In the article The Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship, S.
Ivanovich wrote: Abroad, many believe that there is no anti-Semitism in
Russia, and on that basis they are favorably disposed toward the Soviet
authorities. But in Russia they know that this is not true. However, Jews pray
for the long-life of the Soviet regime and are strongly afraid of its demise,
for Stalin protects them from pogroms and hopefully would protect them in
future. The author sympathizes with such an opinion, although he considers it
flawed: If the Bolshevik dictatorship falls, no doubt there will be wild anti-
Semitic ravages and violence The fall of the Soviet regime would be a
catastrophe for the Jews, and any friend of the Jewish people should reject such
a prospect with horror; yet at the same time he remarks that the Soviet
dictatorship is already embarrassed by the Judeophilia and Jewish dominance
attributed to it.2475
The resolution on Stalins report at the 16th Party Congress provided the
general political direction for the 1930s, calling for an energetic struggle against
chauvinism, and primarily against the Great Russian chauvinism. The Party
language was easily understood by all. And for several more years this struggle
was enthusiastically carried on. Yet what kind of Stalinist madness was it? By
that time there was no trace left of the Great Russian chauvinism. Stalin was not
able to envision the immediate future [of WWII] when only Russian
patriotism would save him from imminent doom.
Then they have already started to sound the alarm about the danger of any
rebirth of Russian patriotism. In 1939, S. Ivanovich claimed to notice a trend
of this dictatorship returning to some national traditions of Moscovite Russ
and Imperial Russia; he caustically cited several stamps that entered popular
discourse around that time such as the love for the Motherland, national
pride etc.2476
See, this is where the mortal danger for Russia lurked then, immediately
before Hitlers assault in that ugly Russian patriotism!
This alarm did not leave the minds of Jewish publicists for the next half
century, even when they looked back at that war, when mass patriotism blazed
up, at the war which saved Soviet Jewry. So in 1988 we read in an Israeli

2475St. Ivanovich. Evrei i Sovetskaya diktatura [The Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship] // JW-1,
p. 50, 51, 52.
2476Ibid., p. 51-52.
magazine: Vivid traditions of the Black Hundreds were the foundation of
vivifying Soviet patriotism, which blossomed later, during the Great Patriotic
War2477 [the official Russian designation for the Eastern front in WWII].
Looking back at that war of 1941-1945, lets admit that this is a highly
ungrateful judgment.
So, even the purest and most immaculate Russian patriotism has no right to
exist not now, not ever?
Why is it so? And why it is that Russian patriotism is thus singled out?

An important event in Jewish life in the USSR was the closing of the YevSek at
the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks in
1930. Though in accord with the Soviet blueprint, this act blocked any separate
development of a Jewish society having national, cultural, and individual
Jewish autonomy. From now on Jewish cultural development lay within the
Soviet mainstream. In 1937-38 the leading Yevseks Dimanshtein, Litvakov,
Frumkina-Ester and their associates Motl Kiper, Itskhok Sudarsky, Aleksandr
Chemerissky who, in words of Yu. Margolina, in the service of the
authorities carried out the greatest pogrom against Jewish culture,2478 were
arrested and soon executed. Many Yevseks, occupying governing positions in
the central and local departments of the Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the
Land (OZET) and in the Jewish community, Jewish cultural and educational
structures, also fell under the juggernaut. In 1936-39, the majority of them
were persecuted.2479 The poisonous atmosphere of 1930s now reached these
levels too. During open public meetings they began to accuse and expose
prominent Jewish communists, who at some time before were members either
of the Bund or of the Zionist Socialist Party, or even of Poale-Zion, all of which
were crippled under the Soviet regime. Was there anyone, whose past the
Bolsheviks did not try to criminalize? Who have you been before? In 1938
Der Emes was closed also.
What about education? Right up to 1933 the number of Jewish schools
and Jewish students in them increased despite the early (1920s) critique of
nationalistic over-zealousness in the actions of the Yevseks on the forced
transition of Jewish education into Yiddish.2480 From 1936 to 1939 a period
of accelerated decline and even more accelerated inner impoverishment of the
schools in Yiddish was noted.2481 After 1936-37 the number of Jewish schools

2477B. Orlov. Rossiya bez evreyev [Russia without Jews] // 22, 1988, (60), p. 160.
2478Yu. Margolin. Tel-Avivskiy bloknot [Tel-Aviv Notebook] // Novoe Russkoe Slovo [The New
Russian Word], New York, August 5, 1968.
2479SJE, v. 8, p. 167.
2480Ibid., p. 176.
2481Yu. Mark. Evreyskaya shkola v Sovetskom Soyuze [The Jewish School in the Soviet Union]
// Kniga o russkom evreystve: 1917-1967 [The Book of Russian Jewry: 1917-1967
(henceforth BRJ)]. New York: Association of Russian Jews, 1968, p. 239.
began to decline quickly even in Ukraine and Belorussia; the desire of parents
to send their children to such schools had diminished. Education in Yiddish
was seen as less and less prestigious; there was an effort to give children an
education in the Russian language. Also, from the second half of the 1930s the
number of institutions of higher education lecturing in Yiddish began to decline
rapidly; almost all Jewish institutions of higher education and technical
schools were closed by 1937-38.2482
At the start of 1930s the Jewish scientific institutes at the academies of
science of Ukraine and Belorussia were closed; in Kiev The Institute of Jewish
Proletarian Culture fell into desolation. And soon after this arrests followed
(Mikhail Kokin of the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, literature and History
was executed; Iokhiel Rabrebe, formerly of the Petrograd Institute of Higher
Jewish Studies, who in the 1930s headed the Jewish Section of the Public
Library, was sentenced to 8 years and died in the transit camp).2483
Persecutions spread to writers in Yiddish: Moyshe Kulbak was persecuted
in 1937; Zelik Akselrod, in 1940; Abram Abchuk, a teacher of Yiddish and a
critic, in 1937; writer Gertsl Bazov , was persecuted in 1938. Writer I. Kharik
and critic Kh. Dunets were persecuted also.
Still, literature in Yiddish was actively published until the end of the
1930s. Jewish publishers were working in Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk. Yet what
kind of literature was it? In the 1930s the overwhelming majority of works
were written stereotypically, in accordance with the unshakable principles of
socialist realism.2484 Literature in Yiddish from the 1930s up to June 1941
was marked by the cult of Stalin. Unbridled flattery for Stalin flowed from the
bosom of Jewish poetry2485 Itsik Feder managed to light up even official
propaganda with lyrical notes. These monstrous sayings are ascribed to his pen:
You betrayed your father this is great!, and I say Stalin but envision the
sun.2486 Most of these writers, who zealously tried to please Stalin, were
arrested ten years later. But some of them, as mentioned above, had already
drawn this lot.
Similarly, the ideological press of official communist doctrine signified
for many Jewish artists and sculptors a complete break up, quite often tragic,
with the national Jewish traditions. (Still, what culture in the USSR was not
touched by this?) So it comes as little surprise that the overwhelming majority
of Jewish theaters devoted much attention to propaganda performances.
This included all 19 aforementioned professional Yiddish theaters and
numerous independent collectives, studios, and circles.2487

2482SJE, v. 8, p. 176, 177, 179.

2483RJE, v. 2, p. 58, 432.
2484SJE, v. 8, p. 179, 181.
2485Yu. Mark. Literatura na idish v Sovetskoy Rossii [Literature in Yiddish in Soviet Russia] //
BRJ, p. 216.
2486Ibid., p. 230.
2487SJE, v. 8, p. 182-183.
 Concerning Hebrew culture which preserved the national traditions: it was
by now conclusively banished and went underground.
It has already been mentioned that the Zionist underground was crushed by
the beginning of the 1930s. Many Zionists were already rounded up, but still
many others were accused of the Zionist conspiracy. Take Pinkhas Dashevsky
(from Chapter 8) in 1933 he was arrested as a Zionist. Pinkhas Krasny was
not a Zionist but was listed as such in his death sentence. He was former
Minister of Petliuras Directorate, emigrated but later returned into the USSR.
He was executed in 1939. Volf Averbukh, a Poale-Zionist from his youth, left
for Israel in 1922, where he collaborated with the communist press. In 1930,
he was sent back to the USSR, where he was arrested.2488
Most of the semi-legal cheder schools and yeshivas were shut down
around that time. Arrests rolled on from the late 1920s in the Hasidic
underground. Yakov-Zakharia Maskalik was arrested in 1937, Abrom-Levik
Slavin was arrested in 1939. By the end of 1933, 237 synagogues were closed,
that is, 57% of all existing in the first years of Soviet authority In the mid-
1930s, the closure of synagogues accelerated. From 1929, the authorities
began to impose excessive tax on matzo baking. In 1937, the Commission on
the Questions of Religions at the Central Executive Committee of the USSR
prohibited baking matzo in Jewish religious communities. In 1937-38 the
majority of clergy of the Jewish religious cult were persecuted. There were no
rabbis in the majority of still-functioning synagogues. 2489 In 1938 a hostile
rabbinical nest was discovered in the Moscow Central Synagogue; the rabbis
and a number of parishioners were arrested.2490 The Rabbi of Moscow, Shmuel-
Leib Medalia, was arrested and executed in 1938. (His son, Moishe Medalia,
was arrested at the same time). In 1937, the Rabbi of Saratov, Iosif Bogatin, was
arrested.2491
In the early 1930s, when the Jewish religion was restricted in the USSR,
the closing of thousands of Orthodox Christian temples and the destruction of
many of them rolled along throughout the entire country. They especially
hurried to liberate Soviet Moscow from the church; Boris Iofan was in charge
of that reconstruction. In that bitter and hungry year of devastating breakdown
of the country, they promoted projects for a grand Palace of Soviets in place of
the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Izvestiya reports: So far, eleven projects are
presented at the exhibition. Particularly interesting among them are the works of
architects Fridman, B. Iofan, Bronshtein, and Ladovsky.2492 Later, the arrests
reached the architects as well.
The move toward settling the toiling Jews on the land gradually became
irrelevant for Soviet Jews. The percentage of Jewish settlers abandoning lands
2488RJE, v. 1, p. 15, 417; v. 2, p. 84.
2489SJE, v. 8, p. 198-199.
2490Gershon Svet. Evreiskaya religiya v Sovetskoy Rossii [The Jewish Religion in Soviet
Russia] // BRJ, p. 209.
2491RJE, v. 1, p. 145; v. 2, p. 260.
2492Izvestiya, July 19, 1931, p. 2.
given to them remained high. In 1930-32, the activity of foreign Jewish
philanthropic organizations such as Agro-Joint, OKG, and EKO in the USSR,
had noticeably decreased. And although in 1933-38 it had still continued
within the frameworks of new restrictive agreements, in 1938 the activity
ceased completely. In the first half of 1938, first the OZET and then the
Committee for Settling the Toiling Jews on the Land (KomZET) were
dissolved. The overwhelming majority of remaining associates of these
organizations, who were still at liberty, were persecuted. By 1939, the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine decided to liquidate the
artificially created national Jewish districts and boroughs.2493
Nonetheless, the idea of a Jewish colony in Birobidzhan was not abandoned
in the 1930s and was even actively advanced by government. In order to put
spirit into the masses, the authorities staged the Second All-Union Congress of
the OZET in Moscow in December 1930.2494 By the end of 1931, the general
population of that oblast was 45,000 with only 5,000 Jews among them,
although whole villages with homes were built for their settlement and access
roads were laid (sometimes by inmates from the camps nearby; for example, the
train station of Birobidzhan was constructed in this manner).2495 Yet non-Jewish
colonization of the region went faster than Jewish colonization.
In order to set matters right, in autumn of 1931 the Presidium of the Central
Executive Committee of the RSFSR decreed that another 25,000 Jews should
be settled in Birobidzhan during the next two years, after which it would be
possible to declare it the Jewish Autonomous Republic. However, in the
following years the number of Jews who left exceeded the number of Jews
arriving, and by the end of 1933, after six years of colonization, the number of
settled Jews amounted only to 8,000; of them only 1,500 lived in rural areas, i.e.
worked in kolkhozes; that is, the Jews comprised less than 1/5 of all kolkhoz
workers there. (There is also information that the land in the Jewish kolkhozes
was fairly often tilled by hired Cossacks and Koreans). The oblast could not
even provide enough agricultural products for its own needs.2496
Nevertheless, in May 1934, when the non-Jewish population had already
reached 50,000, Birobidzhan was loudly declared a Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
(It still did not qualify for the status of a republic.)
Thus, there was no national enthusiasm among the Jewish masses, which
would ease the overcoming of the enormous difficulties inherent in such
colonization. There was no industry in Birobidzhan, and the economic and
social structure of the settlers resembled that of contemporary Jewish towns
and shtetls in Ukraine and Belorussia This was particularly true for the city of
Birobidzhan, especially considering the increased role of the Jews in the local
administrative apparatus.2497
2493SJE, v. 8, p. 173, 190, 193.
2494Izvestiya. December 12, 1930, p. 2.
2495S.M. Schwartz, Birobidjan // BRJ, p. 170-171, 200.
2496Ibid., p. 177-78.
2497S.M. Schwartz, Birobidjan // BRJ, p. 173, 180.
 Culture in Yiddish had certainly developed in the autonomous oblast
there were Jewish newspapers, radio, schools, a theater named after Kaganovich
(its director was the future author E. Kazakevich), a library named after Sholem
Aleichem, a museum of Jewish culture, and public reading facilities. Perets
Markish had published the exultant article, A People Reborn, in the central
press.2498 (In connection with Birobidzhan, lets note the fate of the
demographer Ilya Veitsblit. His position was that the policy of recruitment of
poor urban Jews in order to settle them in rural areas should end; there are no
declass individuals among the Jews, who could be suitable for Birobidzhan.
He was arrested in 1933 and likely died in prison).2499
Yet the central authorities believed that that the colonization should be
stimulated even further; and from 1934 they began a near compulsory
recruitment among Jewish artisans and workers in the western regions, that is,
among the urban population without a slightest knowledge of agriculture. The
slogan rang out: The entire USSR builds the Jewish Autonomous Oblast!
meaning that recruitment of non-Jewish cadres is needed for quicker
development. The ardent Yevsek Dimanshtein wrote that we do not aim to
create a Jewish majority in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast as soon as possible;
this would contradict to the principles of internationalism.2500
But despite all these measures, during the next three years only another
11,000 to eight or nine thousand Jews were added to those already living there;
still, most of newcomers preferred to stay in the oblast capital closer to its
railroad station and looked for opportunities to escape). Yet as we know, the
Bolsheviks may not be defeated or dispirited. So, because of dissatisfaction with
the KomZET, in 1936 the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decided
to partially delegate the overseeing of Jewish resettlement in the Jewish
Autonomous Oblast to the resettlement department of the NKVD. 2501 In August
of 1936, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR
proclaimed that for the first time in the history of the Jewish people, their
ardent desire to have their own homeland has been realized and their own
national statehood has been established.2502 And now they began planning
resettlement of 150,000 more Jews to Birobidzhan.
Looking back at it, the Soviet efforts to convert the Jews to agriculture
suffered the same defeat as the Tsarist efforts a century before.
In the meantime, the year 1938 approached. KomZET was closed, OZET
was disbanded, and the main Yevseks in Moscow and the administrators of the
Jewish Autonomous Oblast were arrested. Those Birobidzhan Jews who could
left for the cities of the Far East or for Moscow. According to the 1939 Census,
the general population of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast consisted of 108,000
people; however, the number of Jews there remained secret the Jewish
2498Izvestiya, October 26, 1936, p. 3.
2499RJE, v. 1, p. 214.
2500S.M. Schwartz. Birobidjan // BRJ, p. 176.
2501SJE, v. 8, p. 190.
2502S.M. Schwartz. Birobidjan // BRJ, p. 177.
population of Birobidzhan was still low. Presumably, eighteen Jewish
kolkhozes still existed, of 40-50 families each,2503 but in those kolkhozes
they conversed and corresponded with the authorities in Russian.
Yet what could Birobidzhan have become for Jews? Just forty-five years
later, the Israeli General Beni Peled emphatically explained why neither
Birobidzhan nor Uganda could give the Jewish people a sense of connection
with the land: I simply feel that I am not ready to die for a piece of land in
Russia, Uganda, or New Jersey!2504
This sense of connection, after thousands of years of estrangement, was
restored by Israel.

The migration of Jews to the major cities did not slow down in the 1930s. The
Jewish Encyclopedia reports that, according to the Census of 1926, there were
131,000 Jews in Moscow; in 1933, there were 226,500; and in 1939, there were
250,000 Jews. As a result of the massive resettlement of Ukrainian Jews, their
share among Moscow Jewry increased to 80%. 2505 In the Book on the Russian
Jewry (1968), we find that in the 1930s up to a half-million Jews were counted
among government workers, sometimes occupying prominent posts, primarily
in the economy.2506 (The author also reports, that in the 1930s up to a half-
million Jews became involved in industry, mainly in manual labor. On the
other hand, Larin provides another figure, that among the industrial workers
there were only 2.7% Jews or 200,0002507 or 2.5 times less than the first
estimate). The flow of Jews into the ranks of office workers grew constantly.
The reason for this was the mass migration to cities, and also the sharp increase
of the educational level, especially of Jewish youth. 2508 The Jews
predominantly lived in the major cities, did not experience artificial social
restrictions, so familiar to their Russian peers, and, it needs to be said, they
studied devotedly, thus preparing masses of technical cadres for the Soviet
future.
Lets glance into statistical data: in 1929 the Jews comprised 13.5% of all
students in the higher educational institutions in the USSR; in 193312.2%; in
193613.3% of all students, and 18% of graduate students (with their share of
the total population being only 1.8%);2509 from 1928 to 1935, the number of

2503Ibid., p. 178, 179.

2504Beni Peled. Mi ne mozhem zhdat eshcho dve tisyachi let! [We Cannot Wait Two Thousand
Years More!] [Interview] // 22, 1981, (17), p. 116.
2505SJE, v. 5, p. 477-478.
2506G. Aronson. Evreyskiy vopros v epokhu Stalina [The Jewish Question in the Stalins Era] //
BRJ, p. 137
2507Yu. Larin. Evrei i anti-Semitism v SSSR [The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR]. M.;
L.: GIZ, 1929, p. 245.
2508SJE, v. 8, p. 190.
2509Ibid.
Jewish students per 1,000 of the Jewish population rose from 8.4 to 20.4 [while]
per 1,000 Belorussians there were 2.4 students, and per 1,000 Ukrainians
2.0; and by 1935 the percentage of Jewish students exceeded the percentage
of Jews in the general population of the country by almost seven times, thus
standing out from all other peoples of the Soviet Union.2510 G.V. Kostirchenko,
who researched Stalins policies on Jews, comments on the results of the 1939
census: After all, Stalin could not disregard the fact that at the start of 1939 out
of every 1,000 Jews, 268 had a high school education, and 57 out of 1,000 had
higher education (among Russians the figures were, respectively, 81 and 6 per
1,000).2511 It is no secret that highly successful completion of higher education
or doctoral studies allowed individuals to occupy socially-prestigious positions
in the robustly developing Soviet economy of the 1930s.2512
However, in The Book on Russian Jewry we find that without
exaggeration, after Ezhovs purges, not a single prominent Jewish figure
remained at liberty in Soviet Jewish society, journalism, culture, or even in the
science.2513 Well, it was absolutely not like that, and it is indeed a gross
exaggeration. (Still, the same author, Grigory Aronson, in the same book, only
two pages later says summarily about the 1930s, that the Jews were not
deprived of general civil rights they continued to occupy posts in the state
and party apparatus, and there were quite a few Jews in the diplomatic
corps, in the general staff of the army, and among the professors in the
institutions of higher learningThus we enter into the year 1939.2514
The voice of Moscow was that of the Peoples Artist, Yury Levitan the
voice of the USSR, that incorruptible prophet of our Truth, the main host of
the radio station of the Comintern and a favorite of Stalin. Entire generations
grew up, listening to his voice: he read Stalins speeches and summaries of
Sovinformburo [the Soviet Information Bureau], and the famous
announcements about the beginning and the end of the war.2515
In 1936 Samuil Samosud became the main conductor of the Bolshoi
Theatre and served on that post for many years. Mikhail Gnesin continued to
produce music in the style of modern European music and in the style of the
so-called New Jewish music; Gnesins sisters successfully ran the music
school, which developed into the outstanding Musical Institute. The ballet of
Aleksandr Krein was performed in the Mariinsky and Bolshoi theatres. Well,
Krein distinguished himself by his symphony, Rhapsody, that is, a Stalins
speech set to music. Kreins brother and nephew flourished also.2516 A number

2510S. Pozner. Sovetskaya Rossiya [The Soviet Russia] // JW-1, p. 264.

2511G. Kostirchenko. Taynaya politika Stalina [The Secret Policy of Stalin], p. 198.
2512SJE, v. 8, p. 190.
2513G. Aronson. Evreyskiy vopros v epokhu Stalina [The Jewish Question in the Stalins Era] //
BRJ, p. 138.
2514Ibid., p. 140-141.
2515RJE, v. 2, p. 150.
2516Gershon Svet. Evrei v russkoy muzikalnoy culture v sovetskiy period [The Jews in Russian
Musical Culture in the Soviet Period] // BRJ, p. 256-262.
of brilliant musicians rose to national and later to international fame: Grigory
Ginzburg, Emil Gilels, Yakov Zak, Lev Oborin, David Oistrakh, Yakov Flier
and many others. Many established theatre directors, theatre and literary critics,
and music scholars continued to work without hindrance.
Examining the culture of the 1930s, it is impossible to miss the
extraordinary achievements of the songwriter composers. Isaak Dunaevsky, a
founder of genres of operetta and mass song in Soviet music, composed easily
digestible songs routinely glorifying the Soviet way of life (The March of
Merry Lads, 1933; The Song of Kakhovka, 1935; The Song about Homeland,
1936; The Song of Stalin, 1936, etc.). Official propaganda on the arts declared
these songs the embodiment of the thoughts and feelings of millions of
Soviet people.2517 Dunaevskys tunes were used as the identifying melody of
Moscow Radio. He was heavily decorated for his service: he was the first of all
composers to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and elected to
the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the notorious year 1937. Later he was also
awarded the Order of Lenin. He used to preach to composers that the Soviet
people do not need symphonies.2518
Matvey Blanter and the brothers Daniil and Dmitry Pokrass were famous
for their complacent hit song If War Strikes Tomorrow (we will instantly crush
the enemy) and for their earlier hit the Budyonny March. There were many
other famous Jewish songwriters and composers in 1930s and later: Oskar
Feltsman, Solovyev-Sedoy, Ilya Frenkel, Mikhail Tanich, Igor Shaferan, Yan
Frenkel and Vladimir Shainsky, etc. They enjoyed copy numbers in the millions,
fame, royalties come on, who dares to name those celebrities among the
oppressed? And after all, alongside the skillfully written songs, how much
blaring Soviet propaganda did they churn out, confusing, brainwashing, and
deceiving the public and crippling good taste and feelings?
What about movie industry? The modern Israeli Jewish Encyclopedia states
that in the 1930s the main role of movies was to glorify the successes of
socialism; a movies entertainment value was minimal. Numerous Jewish
filmmakers participated in the development of standards of a unified and openly
ideological film industry, conservative in form and obsessively didactic. Many
of them were already listed in the previous chapter; take, for example, D.
Vertovs Symphony of the Donbass, 1931, released immediately after the
Industrial Party Trial. Here are a few of the then-celebrated names: F. Ermler
(The Coming, The Great Citizen, Virgin Soil Upturned), S. Yutkevich (The
Coming, The Miners), the famous Mikhail Romm (Lenin in October, Lenin in
1918), L. Arnshtam (Girlfriends, Friends), I. Trauberg (The Son of Mongolia,
The Year 1919), A. Zarkhi and I. Kheifits (Hot Days, Ambassador of the
Baltic).2519 Obviously, filmmakers were not persecuted in the 1930s, though

2517SJE, v. 2, p. 393-394.
2518Yuriy Elagin. Ukroshchenie iskusstv [Conquest of the Arts] / Introduction by M.
Rostropovich. New York: Ermitazh, 1988, p. 340-345.
2519SJE, v. 4, p. 277.
many cinematography, production and film distribution managers were arrested;
two high-ranking bosses of the central management of the cinema industry, B.
Shumyatsky and S. Dukelsky, were even shot.2520
In the 1930s, Jews clearly comprised a majority among filmmakers. So,
who was really the victim deceived viewers, whose souls were steamrolled
with lies and rude didactics, or the filmmakers, who forged documentaries,
biographies and produced pseudo-historical and essentially unimportant
propaganda films, characterized by phony monumentality and inner
emptiness? The Jewish Encyclopedia adds sternly: Huge numbers of Jewish
operators and directors were engaged in making popular science, educational,
and documentary films, in the most official sphere of the Soviet
cinematography, where adroit editing helped to produce a genuine
documentary out of a fraud. For example, R. Karmen, did it regularly without
scruples.2521 (He was a glorified Soviet director, producer of many
documentaries about the civil war in Spain and the Nuremberg Trials; he made
the anniversary-glorifying film The Great Patriotic War, Vietnam, and a film
about Cuba; he was a recipient of three USSR State Prizes (the Stalin Prize) and
the Lenin Prize; he held the titles of the Peoples Artist of the USSR and the
Hero of the Socialist Labor).2522 Lets not forget filmmaker Konrad Wolf, the
brother of the famous Soviet spy, Marcus Wolf.2523
No, the official Soviet atmosphere of 1930s was absolutely free of ill will
toward Jews. And until the war, the overwhelming majority of Soviet Jewry
sympathized with the Soviet ideology and sided with the Soviet regime. There
was no Jewish Question indeed in the USSR before the war or almost none;
then the open anti-Semites were not yet in charge of newspapers and journals
they did not control personnel departments2524 (quite the opposite many
such positions were occupied by Jews).
Sure, then Soviet culture consisted of Soviet patriotism, i.e., of
producing art in accordance with directives from above. Unfortunately, many
Jews were engaged in that pseudo-cultural sphere and some of them even rose
to supervise the Russian language culture. In the early 1930s we see B.M. Volin-
Fradkin at the head of the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing
Affairs (GlavLit), the organ of official censorship, directing the development of
the culture. Many of the GlavLit personnel were Jewish. For example, in
GlavLit, from 1932 to 1941 we see A.I. Bendik, who would become the
Director of the Book Palace during the war. 2525 Emma Kaganova, the spouse of
Chekist Pavel Sudoplatov was trusted to manage the activities of informants

2520Ibid., p. 275.
2521Ibid., p. 277-278.
2522SJE, v. 4, p. 116.
2523RJE, v. 1, p. 245-246.
2524Lev Kopelev. O pravde i terpimosti [Of Truth and Tolerance]. New York: Khronika Press,
1982, p. 56-57.
2525RJE, v. 1, p. 108, 238-239.
among the Ukrainian intelligentsia.2526 After private publishers were abolished,
a significant contribution to the organization and management of Soviet
government publishers was made by S. Alyansky, M. Volfson, I. Ionov
(Bernshtein), A. Kantorovich, B. Malkin, I. Berite, B. Feldman, and many
others.2527 Soon all book publishing was centralized in the State Publishing
House and there was no other place for an author to get his work published.
The Jewish presence was also apparent in all branches of the printed
propaganda Works of the clumsy caricaturist Boris Efimov could be found in
the press everyday (he produced extremely filthy images of Western leaders; for
instance, he had portrayed Nicholas II in a crown carrying a rifle, trampling
corpses). Every two to three days, sketches of other dirty satirists, like G.
Riklin, the piercingly caustic D. Zaslavsky, the adroit Radek, the persistent
Sheinin and the brothers Tur, appeared in press. A future writer L. Kassil wrote
essays for Izvestiya. There were many others: R. Karmen, T. Tess, Kh.
Rappoport, D. Chernomordikov, B. Levin, A. Kantorovich, and Ya. Perelman.
These names I found in Izvestiya only, and there were two dozen more major
newspapers feeding the public with blatant lies. In addition, there existed a
whole sea of ignoble mass propaganda brochures saturated with lies. When they
urgently needed a mass propaganda brochure devoted to the Industrial Party
Trial (such things were in acute demand for all of the 1930s), one B. Izakson
knocked it out under the title: Crush the viper of intervention! Diplomat E.
Gnedin, the son of Parvus, wrote lying articles about the incurable wounds of
Europe and the imminent death of the West. He also wrote a rebuttal article,
Socialist Labor in the Forests of the Soviet North,in response to Western
slanders about the allegedly forced labor of camp inmates felling timber.
When in the 1950s Gnedin returned from a camp after a long term (though, it
appears, not having experienced tree felling himself), he was accepted as a
venerable sufferer and no one reminded him of his lies in the past.
In 1929-31 Russian historical science was destroyed; the Archaeological
Commission, the Northern Commission, Pushkin House, the Library of the
Academy of Sciences were all abolished, traditions were smashed, and
prominent Russian historians were sent to rot in camps. (How much did we hear
about that destruction?) Third and fourth-rate Russian historians then surged in
to occupy the vacant posts and brainwash us for the next half a century. Sure,
quite a few Russian slackers made their careers then, but Jewish ones did not
miss their chance.
Already in the 1930s, Jews played a prominent role in Soviet science,
especially in the most important and technologically-demanding frontiers, and
their role was bound to become even more important in the future. By the end
of 1920s, Jews comprised 13.6% of all scientists in the country; by 1937 their

2526Pavel Sudoplatov. Spetsoperatsii: Lubyanka i Kreml: 1930s-1950s [Special Operations:

Lubyanka [Prison] and the Kremlin: the 1930s through the 1950s]. Moscow: OLMA-Press,
1997, p. 19.
2527SJE, v. 4, p. 397.
share increased to 17.6%; in 1939 there were more than 15,000 or 15.7%
Jewish scientists and lecturers in the institutions of higher learning.2528
In physics, member of the Academy A. F. Ioffe nurtured a highly successful
school. As early as 1918, he founded the Physical-Technical Institute in
Petrograd. Later, fifteen affiliated scientific centers were created; they were
headed by Ioffes disciples. His former students worked in many other
institutes, in many ways determining the scientific and technological potential
of the Soviet Union.2529 (However, repressions did not bypass them. In 1938, in
the Kharkov Physics-Technological Institute, six out of eight heads of
departments were arrested: Vaisberg, Gorsky, Landau, Leipunsky, Obreimov,
Shubnikov; a seventhRuemanwas exiled; only Slutskin remained).2530 The
name of Semyon Aisikovich, the constructor of Lavochkin fighter aircraft, was
long unknown to the public.2531 Names of many other personalities in military
industry were kept secret as well. Even now we do not know all of them. For
instance, M. Shkud oversaw development of powerful radio stations, 2532 yet
there were surely others, whom we do not know, working on the development
of no less powerful jammers.)
Numerous Jewish names in technology, science and its applications prove
that the flower of several Jewish generations went into these fields. Flipping
through the pages of biographical tomes of the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia,
which only lists the Jews who were born or lived in Russia, we see an
abundance of successful and gifted people with real accomplishments (which
also means the absence of obstacles to career entry and advancement in
general).
Of course, scientists had to pay political tribute too. Take, for example, the
First National Conference for the Planning of Science in 1931. Academician
Ioffe stated that modern capitalism is no longer capable of a technological
revolution, it is only possible as a result of a social revolution, which has
transformed the once barbaric and backward Russia into the Socialist Union of
Republics. He praised the leadership of the proletariat in science and said that
science can be free only under Soviet stewardship. Militant philosopher E. Ya.
Kolman (one of main ideologists of Soviet science in the 1930s; he
fulminated against the Moscow school of mathematics) asserted that we should
introduce labor discipline in the sciences, adopt collective methods, socialist
competition, and shock labor methods; he said that science advances thanks to
the proletarian dictatorship, and that each scientist should study Lenins
Materialism and Empirico-criticism. Academician A.G. Goldman (Ukraine)

2528SJE, v. 8, p. 190-191.
2529L.L. Mininberg. Sovetskie evrei v nauke i promishlennosti SSSR v period Vtoroi mirovoi
voyny (1941-1945) [Soviet Jews in the Soviet Science and Industry during the Second
World War (1941-1945)]. Moscow, 1995, p. 16.
2530Alexander Weissberg. Conspiracy of Silence. London, 1952, p. 359-360.
2531SJE, v. 4, p. 660.
2532RJE, v. 3, p. 401.
enthusiastically chimed in: The academy now became the leading force in the
struggle for the Marxist dialectic in science!2533
The Jewish Encyclopedia summarizes: At the end of 1930s, the role of the
Jews in the various spheres of the Soviet life reached its apogee for the entire
history of the Soviet regime. According to the 1939 census, 40% of all
economically active Jews were state employees. Around 364,000 were
categorized among the intelligentsia. Of them, 106,000 were engineers or
technologists, representing 14% of all professionals of this category country-
wide; 139,000 were managers at various levels, 7% of all administrators in the
USSR; 39,000 doctors, or slightly less than 27% of all doctors; 38,000
teachers, or more than 3% of all teachers; more than 6,500 writers, journalists,
and editors; more than 5,000 actors and filmmakers; more than 6,000
musicians; a little less than 3,000 artists and sculptors; and more than 5,000
lawyers.2534
In the opinion of the Encyclopedia, such impressive representation by a
national minority, even in the context of official internationalism and
brotherhood of the peoples of the USSR, created the prerequisites for the
backlash by the state.2535

During his political career, Stalin often allied with Jewish leaders of the
communist party and relied on many Jewish back-benchers. By the mid-1930s
he saw in the example of Hitler all the disadvantages of being a self-declared
enemy of the Jews. Yet he likely harbored hostility toward them (his daughters
memoirs support this), though even his closest circle was probably unaware of
it. However, struggling against the Trotskyites, he, of course, realized this aspect
as well his need to further get rid of the Jewish influence in the party. And,
sensing the war, he perhaps was also grasping that proletarian
internationalism alone would not be sufficient and that the notion of the
homeland, and even the Homeland, would be much needed.
S. Schwartz lamented about anti-revolutionary transformation of the party
as the unprecedented purge of the ruling party, the virtual destruction of the
old party and the establishment of a new communist party under the same name
in its place new in social composition and ideology. From 1937 he also noted
a gradual displacement of Jews from the positions of power in all spheres of
public life. Among the old Bolsheviks who were involved in the activity
before the party came to power and especially among those with the pre-
revolutionary involvement, the percentage of Jews was noticeably higher than in
the party on average; in younger generations, the Jewish representation became
even smaller As a result of the purge, almost all important Jewish

2533Izvestiya, April 7, 1931, p. 2; April 11, p. 3; April 12, p. 4. See also RJE, v. 2, p. 61-62.
2534SJE, v. 8, p. 191.
2535SJE, v. 8, p. 191.
communists left the scene.2536 Lazar Kaganovich was the exception. Still, in
1939, after all the massacres, the faithful communist Zemlyachka was made the
deputy head of the Soviet of Peoples Commissars, and S. Dridzo-Lozovsky
was assigned the position of Deputy to the Narkom of Foreign Affairs.2537 And
yet, in the wider picture, Schwartzs observations are reasonable as was
demonstrated above.
S. Schwartz adds that in the second half of 1930s Jews were gradually
barred from entering institutions of higher learning, which were preparing
specialists for foreign relations and foreign trade, and were barred from military
educational institutions.2538 The famous defector from the USSR, I.S. Guzenko,
shared rumors about a secret percentage quota on Jewish admissions to the
institutions of higher learning which was enforced from 1939.
In the 1990s they even wrote that Molotov, taking over the Peoples
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in the spring of 1939, publicly announced
during the general meeting with the personnel that he will deal with the
synagogue here, and that he began firing Jews on the very same day. (Still,
Litvinov was quite useful during the war in his role as Soviet ambassador to the
U.S. They say that upon his departure from the U.S. in 1943 he even dared to
pass a personal letter to Roosevelt suggesting that Stalin had unleashed an anti-
Semitic campaign in the USSR).2539
By the mid-1930s the sympathy of European Jewry toward the USSR had
further increased. Trotsky explained it in 1937 on his way to Mexico: The
Jewish intelligentsia turns to the Comintern not because they are interested
in Marxism or Communism, but in search of support against aggressive
[German] anti-Semitism.2540 Yet it was this same Comintern that approved the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the pact that dealt a mortal blow to the East
European Jewry!
In September 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews fled from the
advancing German armies, fleeing further and further east and trying to head for
the territory occupied by the Red Army. For the first two months they
succeeded because of the favorable attitude of the Soviet authorities. The
Germans quite often encouraged this flight. But at the end of November the
Soviet government closed the border.2541

2536S.M. Schwartz. Antisemitizm v Sovetskom Soyuze [Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union].

New York: Chekovs Publishing House, 1952, p. 111-112, 114, 121-122.
2537RJE, v. 1, p. 486; v. 2, p. 196.
2538S.M. Schwartz. Evrei v Sovetskom Soyuze s nachala Vtoroi mirovoi voyny (1939-1965)
[Jews in the Soviet Union after the Beginning of the Second World War (1939-1965)]. New
York: Publication of the American Jewish Workers Committee, 1966, p. 410.
2539Z. Sheinis, M.M. Litvinov. Poslednie dni [The Last Days] // Sovershenno Sekretno [Top
Secret]. Moscow, 1992, (4), p. 15.
2540Lev Trotsky. Pochemu oni kayalis [Why They Repented] // EW, New York, 1985, (87), p.
226.
2541E. Kulisher. Izgnanie i deportatsiya evreev [The Expulsion and Deportation of the Jews] //
Evreiskiy mir [The Jewish World], v. 2 (henceforthJW-2). New York: Soyuz russkikh
evreyev v New Yorke [The Union of Russian Jews in New York], 1944, p. 259.
 In different areas of the front things took shape differently: in some areas,
the Soviets would not admit Jewish refugees at all; in other places they were
welcomed but later sometimes sent back to the Germans. Overall, it is believed
that around 300,000 Jews managed to migrate from the Western to the Eastern
Poland in the first months of the war, and later the Soviets evacuated them
deeper into the USSR. They demanded that Polish Jews register as Soviet
citizens, but many of them did not rush to accept Soviet citizenship: after all,
they thought, the war would soon be over, and they would return home, or go to
America, or to Palestine. (Yet in the eyes of the Soviet regime they thereby
immediately fell under the category of suspected of espionage, especially if
they tried to correspond with relatives in Poland). 2542 Still, we read in the
Chicago Sentinel that the Soviet Union gave refuge to 90% of all European
Jewish refugees fleeing from Hitler.2543
According to the January 1939 census, 3,020,000 Jews lived in the USSR.
Now, after occupation of the Baltics, annexation of a part of Poland, and taking
in Jewish refugees, approximately two million more Jews were added, giving a
total of around 5 million. 2544 Before 1939, the Jews were the seventh largest
people in the USSR number-wise; now, after annexation of all Western areas,
they became the fourth largest people of the USSR, after the three Slavic
peoples, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian. The mutual non-Aggression
Pact of 23 August 1939 between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union evoked
serious fear about the future of Soviet Jewry, though the policy of the Soviet
Union toward its Jewish citizens was not changed. And although there were
some reverse deportations, overall, the legal status of Jewish population
remained unchanged during the 20 months of the Soviet-German
collaboration.2545
With the start of war in Poland, Jewish sympathies finally crystallized and
Polish Jews, and the Jewish youth in particular, met the advancing Red Army
with exulting enthusiasm. Thus, according to many testimonies (including M.
Agurskys one), Polish Jews, like their co-ethnics in Bessarabia, Bukovina and
Lithuania, became the main pillar of the Soviet regime, supporting it tooth and
nail.
Yet how much did these East European Jews know about what was going
on in the USSR?
They unerringly sensed that a catastrophe was rolling at them from
Germany, though still not fully or clearly recognized, but undoubtedly a

2542S.M. Schwartz. Evrei v Sovetskom Soyuze s nachala Vtoroi mirovoi voyny (1939-1965)
[Jews in the Soviet Union after the Beginning of the Second World War (1939-1965)]. New
York: Publication of the American Jewish Workers Committee, 1966, p. 33-34.
2543The Sentinel, Chicago, Vol. XXXXIII, (13), 1946, 27 June, p.5.
2544G. Aronson. Evreyskiy vopros v epokhu Stalina [The Jewish Question in the Stalins Era] //
BRJ, p. 141.
2545I. Shekhman. Sovetskoe evreystvo v germano-sovetskoy voyne [Soviet Jewry in the Russo-
German War] // JW-2, p. 221-222.
catastrophe. And so the Soviet welcome appeared to them to embody certain
salvation.
 Chapter 20. In the camps of GULag

If I havent been there, it wouldnt be possible for me to compose this chapter.

Before the camps I thought that one should not notice nationalities, that
there are no nationalities, there is only humankind.
But when you are sent into the camp, you find it out: if you are of a lucky
nationality then you are a fortunate man. You are provided for. You have
survived! But if you are of a common nationality well then, no offence
Because nationality is perhaps the most important trait that gives a prisoner
a chance to be picked into the life-saving corps of Idiots [translator note:
from Russian a fool or idiot. This is an inmate slang term to
denote other inmates who didnt do common labor but managed to obtain
positions with easy duties, usually pretending to be incapable of doing hard
work because of poor health]. Every experienced camp inmate can confirm
that ethnic proportions among Idiots were very different from those in the
general camp population. Indeed, there were virtually no Pribalts among Idiots,
regardless of their actual number in the camp (and there were many of them);
there were always Russians, of course, but in incomparably smaller proportion
than in the camp on average (and those were often selected from orthodox
members of the Party); on the other hand, some others were noticeably
concentrated Jews, Georgians, Armenians; and Azeris also ended there in
higher proportions, and, to some extent, Caucasian mountaineers also.
Certainly, none of them can be blamed for that. Every nation in the Gulag
did its best crawling to survival, and the smaller and nimbler it was, the easier it
was to accomplish. And again, Russians were the very last nation in their own
Russian camps, like they were in the German Kriegsgefan-genenlagers.
Yet it is not us who could have blamed them, but it is they Armenians,
Georgians, highlanders, who would have been in their right to ask us: Why did
you establish these camps? Why do you force us to live in your state? Do not
hold us and we will not land here and occupy these such attractive Idiotic
positions! But while we are your prisoners a la guerre comme a la guerre.
But what about Jews? For Fate interwove Russian and Jews, perhaps
forever, which is why this book is being written.
Before that, before this very line, there will be readers who have been in the
camps and who havent been, who will be quick to contest the truth of what I
say here. They will claim that many Jews were forced to take part in common
labor activities. They will deny that there were camps where Jews were the
majority among Idiots. They will indignantly reject that nations in the camps
were helping each other selectively, and, therefore, at the expense of others.
Some others will not consider themselves as distinct Jews at all,
perceiving themselves as Russians in everything. Besides, even if there was
overrepresentation of Jews on key camp positions, it was absolutely
unpremeditated, wasnt it? The selection was exclusively based on merit and
personal talents and abilities to do business. Well, who is to blame if Russians
lack business talents?
There will be also those who will passionately assert directly opposite: that
it was Jews who suffered worst in the camps. This is exactly how it is
understood in the West: in Soviet camps nobody suffered as badly as Jews.
Among the letters from readers of Ivan Denisovich there was one from an
anonymous Jew: You have met innocent Jews who languished in camps with
you, and you obviously not at once witnessed their suffering and persecution.
They endured double oppression: imprisonment and enmity from the rest of
inmates. Tell us about these people!
And if I wished to generalize and state that the life of Jews in camps was
especially difficult, then I would be allowed to do so and wouldnt be peppered
with admonitions for unjust ethnic generalizations. But in the camps, where I
was imprisoned, it was the other way around the life of Jews, to the extent of
possible generalization, was easier.
Semen Badash, my campmate from Ekibastuz, recounts in his memoirs
how he had managed to settle later, in a camp at Norilsk in the medical
unit: Max Minz asked a radiologist Laslo Newsbaum to solicit for Badash
before a free head of the unit. He was accepted. 2546 But Badash at least finished
three years of medical school before imprisonment. Compare that with other
nurses Genkin, Gorelik, Gurevich (like one of my pals, L. Kopelev from
Unzlag) who never before in their lives had anything to do with medicine.
Some people absolutely seriously write like this: A. Belinkov was thrown
into the most despicable category of Idiots (and I am tempted to
inappropriately add and languishers here, though the Languishers were the
social antipodes of Idiots and Belinkov never was among the Languishers).
To be thrown into the group ofIdiots! whats an expression! To be
diminished by being accepted into the ranks of gentlemen? And here goes the
justification: To dig soil? But at the age of 23 he not only never did it he
never saw a shovel in his life.2547 Well then he had no other choice but to
become an Idiot.
Or read what Levitin-Krasnov wrote about one Pinsky, a literature expert,
that he was a nurse in the camp. Which means that he, on the camp scale, has

2546 . , New York: Effect Publishing Inc.. 1986, . 65-

66.
2547. . // :
. -, 1991, 113. . 168.
adhered well. However, Levitin presents this as an example of the greatest
humiliation possible for a professor of the humanities.
Or take prisoner who survived, Lev Razgon, a journalist and not a medic at
all, who was heavily published afterwards. But from his story in Ogonek
(1988) we find that he used to be a medic in the camps medical unit, and,
moreover, an unescorted medic. (From other his stories we can figure out that
he also worked as a senior controller at a horrible timber logging station. But
there is not a single story from which we can conclude that he ever participated
in common labor.)
Or a story of Frank Dikler, a Jew from faraway Brazil: he was imprisoned
and couldnt speak Russian, of course, and guess what? He had pull in the
camp, and he has became a chief of the medical units kitchen a truly
magnificent treasure!
Or Alexandr Voronel, who was a political youngster when he landed in
the camps, says that immediately after getting in the camp, he was readily
assisted by other Jewish inmates, who had not a slightest idea about my
political views. A Jewish inmate, responsible for running the bathhouse (a very
important Idiot as well), has spotted him instantly and ordered him to come if
he needs any help; a Jew from prisoner security (also an Idiot) told another
Jew, a brigadier: There are two Jewish guys, Hakim, dont allow them to get in
trouble. And the brigadier gave them strong protection. Other thieves,
especially elders, approved him: You are so right, Hakim! You support your
own kin! Yet we, Russians, are like wolves to each other.2548
And lets not forget that even during camp imprisonment, by virtue of a
common stereotype regarding all Jews as businessmen, many of them were
getting commercial offers, sometimes even when they didnt actively look for
such enterprises. Take, for instance, M. Hafez. He emphatically notes: What a
pity that I cant describe you those camp situations. There are so many rich,
beautiful stories! However, the ethical code of a reliable Jew seals my mouth.
You know even the smallest commercial secret should be kept forever. Thats
the law of the Tribe.2549
A Lett Ane Bernstein, one of my witnesses from Archipelago, thinks that he
managed to survive in the camps only because in times of hardship he asked the
Jews for help and that the Jews, judging by his last name and nimble manners,
mistook him for their tribesman and always provided assistance. He says that
in all his camps Jews always constituted the upper crust, and that the most
important free employees were also Jews (Shulman head of special
department, Greenberg head of camp station, Kegels chief mechanic of the
factory), and, according to his recollections, they also preferred to select Jewish
inmates to staff their units.

2548. . . 2- . -: -, 1981, .
28-29.
2549 . ( ). : , 1978, .
93.
 This particular Jewish national contract between free bosses and inmates is
impossible to overlook. A free Jew was not so stupid to actually see an Enemy
of the People or an evil character preying on the peoples property in an
imprisoned Jew (unlike what a dumb-headed Russian saw in another Russian).
He in the first place saw a suffering tribesman and I praise them for this
sobriety! Those who know about terrific Jewish mutual supportiveness
(especially exacerbated by mass deaths of Jews under Hitler) would understand
that a free Jewish boss simply could not indifferently watch Jewish prisoners
flounder in starvation and die, and not help. But I am unable to imagine a free
Russian employee who would save and promote his fellow Russian prisoners to
the privileged positions only because of their nationality. Though we have lost
15 millions during collectivization, we are still numerous. You cant care about
everyone, and nobody would even think about it.
Sometimes, when such a team of Jewish inmates smoothly bands together
and, being no longer impeded by the ferocious struggle for survival, they can
engage in extraordinary activities. An engineer named Abram Zisman tells us:
In Novo-Archangelsk camp, in our spare time, [we] decided to count how
many Jewish pogroms occurred over the course of Russian history. We managed
to excite the curiosity of our camp command on this question (they had a
peaceful attitude toward us). TheNachlag [camp commander] was captain
Gremin (N. Gershel, a Jew, son of a tailor from Zhlobin). He sent an inquiry to
the archives of the former Interior Department requesting the necessary
information, and after eight months we received an official reply that 76
Jewish pogroms occurred from 1811 to 1917 on the territory of Russia with the
number of victims estimated at approximately 3,000 (That is, the total number
of those who suffered in any way.) The author reminds us that during one six-
month period in medieval Spain more than twenty thousand Jews were
killed.2550
A plot-like atmosphere emanates from the recollections of Josef Berger, a
communist, about a highly-placed snitch Lev Ilyich Inzhir. A former Menshevik,
arrested in 1930, he immediately began collaborating with the GPU, fearing
reprisals against his family and the loss of his apartment in the center of
Moscow. He helped to prepare the Menshevik trial of 1931, falsely testified
against his best friends, was absolved and immediately appointed as a chief
accountant of Belomorstroi. During the Yezhovschina he was a chief accountant
of the GULag enjoying the complete trust of his superiors and with
connections to the very top NKVD officials. (Inzhir recalled one Jewish
NKVD veteran who interlarded his words with aphorisms from Talmud.) He
was arrested later again, this time on the wave of anti-Yezhov purges. However,
Inzhirs former colleagues from the GULag favorably arranged his
imprisonment. However, at this point he turned into an explicit snitch and
provocateur, and other inmates suspected that the plentiful parcels he was

2550. . // , -, 1960, 7 ,
. 3.
receiving were not from his relatives but directly from the Third Department.
Nevertheless, later in 1953 in the Tayshet camp, he was sentenced to an
additional jail term, this time being accused of Trotskyism and of concealing his
sympathies for the State of Israel from the Third Department.2551
Of worldwide infamy, BelBallag absorbed hundreds of thousands of
Russian, Ukrainian and Middle Asian peasants between 1931 and 1932.
Opening a newspaper issue from August, 1933, dedicated to the completion of
the canal [between White and Baltic seas], we find a list of awardees. Lower
ranking orders and medals were awarded to concreters, steelfixers, etc, but the
highest degree of decoration, the Order of Lenin, was awarded to eight men
only, and we can see large photographs of each. Only two of them were actual
engineers, the rest were the chief commanders of the canal (according to
Stalins understanding of personal contribution). And whom do we see here?
Genrikh Yagoda, head of NKVD. Matvei Berman, head of GULag. Semen Firin,
commander of BelBaltlag (by that time he was already the commander of
Dmitlag, where the story will later repeat itself). Lazar Kogan, head of
construction (later he will serve the same function at Volgocanal). Jacob
Rapoport, deputy head of construction. Naftaly Frenkel, chief manager of the
labor force of Belomorstroi (and the evil demon of the whole Archipelago).2552
And all their portraits were enlarged and reprinted again in the solemnly
shameful book Belomorcanal2553 a book of huge Scriptural size, like some
revelation anticipating advent of the Millenarian Kingdom.
And then I reproduced these six portraits of villains in Archipelago,
borrowing them from their own exhibition and without any prior editing,
showing everybody who was originally displayed. Oh my God, what a
worldwide rage has surged! How dared I?! This is anti-Semitism! I am a
branded and screwed anti-Semite. At best, to reproduce these portraits was
national egotism i.e. Russian egotism! And they dared to say it despite what
follows immediately on the next pages of Archipelago: how docilely Kulak
lads were freezing to death under their barrows.
One wonders, where were their eyes in 1933 when it was printed for the
very first time? Why werent they so indignant then?
Let me repeat what I professed once to the Bolsheviks: one should be
ashamed of hideosity not when it is disclosed to public but when it is done.
A particular conundrum exists with respect to the personality of Naftaly
Frenkel, that tireless demon of Archipelago: how to explain his strange return
from Turkey in 1920s? He successfully got away from Russia with all his
capitals after the first harbingers of revolution. In Turkey, he attained a secure,
rich and unconstrained social standing, and he never harbored any Communist
ideas. And yet he returned? To come back and become a toy for the GPU and
2551 . : / . . Firenze: Edizioni
Aurora. 1973, . 148-164.
2552, 1933. 5 , . 1-2.
2553- : / . .
, .. . .. . [.]: , 1934.
for Stalin, to spend several years in imprisonment himself, but in return to
accomplish the most ruthless oppression of imprisoned engineers and the
extermination of hundreds of thousands of the de-Kulakized? What could
have motivated his insatiable evil heart? I am unable to imagine any possible
reason except vengeance toward Russia. If anyone can provide an alternative
explanation, please do so.2554
What else could be revealed by someone with a thorough understanding of
the structure of the camp command? The head of 1st Department of
Belomorstroi was one Wolf; the head of the Dmitrov section of Volgocanal was
Bovshover. The finance division of Belomorstroi was headed by L. Berenzon,
his deputies were A. Dorfman, the already mentioned Inzhir, Loevetsky, Kagner,
Angert. And how many of the other humbler posts remain unmentioned? Is it
really reasonable to suppose that Jews were digging soil with shovels and racing
their hand-barrows and dying under those barrows from exhaustion and
emaciation? Well, view it as you wish. A. P. Skripnikova and D. P. Vitkovsky,
who were there, told me that Jews were overrepresented among Idiots during
construction of Belomorcanal, and they did not roll barrows and did not die
under them.
And you could find highly-placed Jewish commanders not only at
BelBaltlag. Construction of the Kotlas-Vorkuta railroad was headed by Moroz
(his son married Svetlana Stalina); the special officer-in-charge of GULag in the
Far East was Grach. These are only a few of the names, which resurfaced
accidentally. If a former inmate Thomas Sgovio, an American national, didnt
write to me, I wouldnt be aware about the head of the Chai-Uryinsk Mining
Administration on Kolyma between 1943-44 (at the depths of the Patriotic
War): Half-colonel Arm was a tall black-haired Jew with a terrible
reputation His orderly man was selling ethanol to everybody, 50 grams for 50
rubles. Arm had his own personal tutor of English a young American, arrested
in Karelia. His wife was paid a salary for an accountants position, but she
didnt work her job was actually performed by an inmate in the office (a
common practice revealing how families of GULag commanders used to have
additional incomes).
Or take another case: during the age of glasnost, one Soviet newspaper
published a story about the dreadful GULag administration that built a tunnel
between Sakhalin and the mainland. It was called the Trust of Arais. 2555 Who
was that comrade Arais? I have no idea. But how many perished in his mines
and in the unfinished tunnel?
Sure, I knew a number of Jews (they were my friends) who carried all the
hardships of common labor. In Archipelago, I described a young man, Boris
Gammerov, who quickly found his death in the camp. (While his friend, the
writer Ingal, was made an accountant from the very first day in the camp,
although his knowledge of arithmetic was very poor.) I knew Volodya Gershuni,

2554 .
2555. . // , 1989, 18 , . 1.
an irreconcilable and incorruptible man. I knew Jog Masamed, who did
common labor in the hard labor camp at Ekibastuz on principle, though he was
called upon to join the Idiots. Besides, I would like to list here a teacher Tatyana
Moiseevna Falike, who spent 10 years drudging, she said, like a beast of
burden. And I also would like to name here a geneticist Vladimir Efroimson,
who spent 13 out of his 36 months of imprisonment (one out of his two terms)
doing common labor. He also did it on principle, though he also had better
options. Relying on parcels from home (one cannot blame him for that), he
picked the hand-barrow precisely because there were many Jews from Moscow
in that Jezkazgan camp, and they were used to settling well, while Efroimson
wanted to dispel any grudge toward Jews, which was naturally emerging among
inmates. And what did his brigade think about his behavior? He is a black
sheep among Jews; would a real Jew roll a barrow? He was similarly ridiculed
by Jewish Idiots who felt annoyed that he flaunted himself to reproach them.
In the same vein, another Jew, Jacov Davydovich Grodzensky, who
also beavered in the common category, was judged by others: Is he really a
Jew?
It is so symbolic! Both Efroimson and Grodzenskiy did those right and best
things, which could be only motivated by the noblest of Jewish appeals, to
honestly share the common lot, and they were not understood by either side!
They are always difficult and derided the paths of austerity and dedication, the
only ones that can save humanity.
I try not to overlook such examples, because all my hopes depend on them.
Lets add here a valiant Gersh Keller, one of the leaders of Kengir uprising
in 1954 (he was 30 years old when executed). I also read about Yitzhak
Kaganov, commander of an artillery squadron during the Soviet-German war. In
1948, he was sentenced to 25 years for Zionism. During 7 years of
imprisonment he wrote 480 pieces of poetry in Hebrew, which he memorized
without writing them down.2556
During his third trial (July 10, 1978), after already serving two terms,
Alexander Ginsburg, was asked a question What is your nationality? and
replied: Inmate! That was a worthy and serious response, and it angered the
tribunal. But he deserved it for his work for the Russian Public Relief Fund,
which provided assistance to families of political prisoners of all nationalities,
and by his manly vocation. This is what we are a genuine breed of prisoners,
regardless of nationality.
However, my camps were different, spanning from the great Belomor
to the tiny 121st camp district of the 15th OLP of Moscows UITLK (which left
behind a not inconspicuous semi-circular building at Kalugas gate in Moscow).
Out there, our entire life was directed and trampled by three leading Idiots:
Solomon Solomonov, a chief accountant; David Burstein, first an educator
and later a work-assigning clerk; and Isaac Bershader. (Earlier, in exactly the

2556 . 2- ., . . .. 1994. . 1, . 526-527;

1995. . 2. . 27.
same way, Solomonov and Bershader ruled over the camp at the Moscow
Highway Institute, MHI.) Note that all this happened under auspices of a
Russian camp commander, one ensign Mironov.
All three of them came up before my eyes, and to get positions for them, in
each case their Russian predecessors were instantly removed from the posts.
Solomonov was sent in first; he confidently seized a proper position and quickly
got on the right side of the ensign. (I think, using food and money from outside.)
Soon after that the wretched Bershader was sent in from MHI with an
accompanying note to use him only in the common labor category (a quite
unusual situation for a domestic criminal, which probably meant substantial
delinquency). He was about fifty years old, short, fat, with a baleful glare. He
walked around condescendingly inspecting our living quarters, with the look of
a general from the head department.
The senior proctor asked him: What is your
specialty? Storekeeper. There is no such specialty Well, I am a
storekeeper. Anyway, you are going to work in the common labor brigade.
For two days he was sent there. Shrugging his shoulders, he went out, and, upon
entering the work zone, he used to seat himself on a stone and rest respectably.
The brigadier would have hit him, but he quailed the newcomer was so self-
confident, that anyone could sense power behind him. The camps storekeeper,
Sevastyanov, was depressed as well. For two years he was in charge of the
combined provision and sundry store. He was firmly established and lived on
good terms with the brass, but now he was chilled: everything is already settled!
Bershader is a storekeeper by specialty!
Then the medical unit discharged Bershader from the labor duties on
grounds of poor health and after that he rested in the living quarters.
Meanwhile, he probably got something from outside. And within less than a
week Sevastyanov was removed from his post, and Bershader was made a
storekeeper (with the assistance of Solomonov). However, at this point it was
found that the physical labor of pouring grain and rearranging boots, which was
done by Sevastyanov single-handedly, was also contraindicated for Bershader.
So he was given a henchman, and Solomonovs bookkeeping office enlisted the
latter as service personnel. But it was still not a sufficiently abundant life. The
best looking proudest woman of the camp, the swan-like lieutenant-sniper M.
was bent to his will and forced to visit him in his store-room in the evenings.
After Burstein showed himself in the camp, he arranged to have another camp
beauty, A. S., to come to his cubicle.
Is it difficult to read this? But they were by no means troubled how it
looked from outside. It even seemed as if they thickened the impression on
purpose. And how many such little camps with similar establishments were
there all across the Archipelago?
And did Russian Idiots behave in the same way, unrestrained and
insanely!? Yes. But within every other nation it was perceived socially, like an
eternal strain between rich and poor, lord and servant. However, when an alien
emerges as a master over life and death it further adds to the heavy
resentment. It might appear strange isnt it all the same for a
worthless negligible, crushed, and doomed camp dweller surviving at one of his
dying stages? isnt it all the same who exactly seizes the power inside the camp
and celebrates crows picnics over his trench-grave? As it turns out, it is not.
These things have been etched into my memory inerasably.
In my play Republic of Labor, I presented some of the events that happened
in that camp on Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya 30. Understanding the impossibility of
depicting everything like it was in reality, because it would be inevitably
considered as incitement of anti-Jewish sentiment (as if that trio of Jews was
not inflaming it in real life, caring little about consequences) I withheld the
abominably greedy Bershader. I concealed Burstein. I recomposed the profiteer
Rosa Kalikman into an amorphous Bella of eastern origin, and retained the only
Jew, accountant Solomonov, exactly like he was in life.
So, what about my loyal Jewish friends after they perused the play? The
play aroused extraordinarily passionate protests from V. L. Teush. He read it not
immediately but when Sovremennik had already decided to stage it in 1962, so
the question was far from scholarly. The Teushes were deeply injured by the
figure of Solomonov. They thought it was dishonest and unjust to show such a
Jew (despite that in the real life, in the camp, he was exactly as I showed him)
in the age of oppression of Jews. (But then, it appears to me that such age
is everlasting? When have our Jews not been oppressed?) Teush was alarmed
and extremely agitated, and put forward an ultimatum that if I did not remove or
at least soften up the image of Solomonov, then all our friendship will be ruined
and he and his wife will no longer be able to keep my manuscripts. Moreover,
they prophesized that my very name will be irretrievably lost and blemished if I
leave Solomonov in the play. Why not to make him a Russian? They were
astonished. Is it so important that he be a Jew? (But if it doesnt matter, why did
Solomonov select Jews to be Idiots?)
I took a chill pill: a sudden censorial ban, no less weighty than the official
Soviet prohibition, had emerged from an unanticipated direction. However, the
situation was soon resolved by the official prohibition forbidding Sovremennik
to stage the piece.
And there was another objection from Teush: Your Solomonov has
anything but Jewish personality. A Jew always behaves discreetly, cautiously,
suppliantly, and even cunningly, but from where comes this pushy impudence of
jubilant force? This is not true, it cannot happen like this!
However, I remember not this Solomonov alone, and it was exactly like
that! I saw many things in the 1920s and 1930s in Rostov-on-Don. And
Frenkel acted similarly, according to the recollections of surviving engineers.
Such a slip of a triumphant power into insolence and arrogance is the most
repelling thing for those around. Sure, it is usually behavior of the worst and
rudest but this is what becomes imprinted in memory. (Likewise the Russian
image is soiled by the obscenities of our villains.)
 All these blandishments and appeals to avoid writing about the things like
they were are undistinguishable from what we heard from the highest Soviet
tribunes: about anti-defamation, about socialist realism to write like it should
be, not like it was.
As if a creator is capable of forgetting or creating his past anew! As if the
full truth can be written in parts, including only what is pleasing, secure and
popular.
And how meticulously all the Jewish characters in my books were analyzed
with every personal feature weighted on apothecary scales. But the astonishing
story of Grigory M., who did not deliver the order to retreat to a dying regiment
because he was frightened (Archipelago GULag, v. 6, Ch. 6) was not noticed.
It was passed over without a single word! And Ivan Denisovich added insult to
injury: there were such sophisticated sufferers but I put forward a boor!
For instance, during Gorbachevs glasnost, emboldened Asir Sandler
published his camp memoirs. After first perusal, I emphatically rejected One
Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich the main personage was Ivan
Denisovich, a man with minimal spiritual needs, focused only on his mundane
troubles and Solzhenitsyn turned him into the national image (Exactly like
all well-meaning communists were grumbling at that time!) While
[Solzhenitsyn] preferred not to notice the true intelligentsia, the determinant of
domestic culture and science. Sandler was discussing this with Miron
Markovich Etlis (both used to be Idiots in medical unit). And Etlis added: The
story is significantly distorted, placed upside down. Solzhenitsyn failed to
emphasize the intelligent part of our contingent Self-centered reflections
[of Ivan Denisovich] about himself that patience that pseudo-Christian
attitude toward others. And in 1964 Sandler was lucky to relieve his feelings in
conversation with Ehrenburg himself. And the latter affirmatively nodded when
Sandler mentioned his extremely negative feeling toward my novelette.2557
However, not a single Jew reproached me that Ivan Denisovich, in essence,
attends to Cesar Markovich as a servant, albeit with good feelings.

2557 . : . .
-. 1988, . 22. 62-64.
 Chapter 21. During the Soviet-German War

After Kristallnacht (November 1938) the German Jews lost their last illusions
about the mortal danger they were facing. With Hitlers campaign in Poland, the
deadly storm headed East. Yet nobody expected that the beginning of the
Soviet-German War would move Nazi politics to a new level, toward total
physical extermination of Jews.
While they naturally expected all kinds of hardship from the German
conquest, Soviet Jews could not envision the indiscriminate mass killings of
men and women of all ages one cannot foresee such things. Thus the terrible
and inescapable fate befell those who remained in the German-occupied
territories without a chance to resist. Lives ended abruptly. But before their
death, they had to pass through either initial forced relocation to a Jewish
ghetto, or a forced labor camp, or to gas vans, or through digging ones own
grave and stripping before execution.
The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia gives many names of the Russian Jews
who fell victims to the Jewish Catastrophe; it names those who perished in
Rostov, Simferopol, Odessa, Minsk, Belostok, Kaunas, and Narva. There were
prominent people among them. The famous historian S.M. Dubnov spent the
entire inter-war period in exile. He left Berlin for Riga after Hitler took power.
He was arrested during the German occupation and placed in a ghetto; in
December 1941 he was included into a column of those to be executed.From
Vilna, historian Dina Joffe and director of the Jewish Gymnasium Joseph
Yashunskiy were sent to concentration camps (both were killed in Treblinka in
1943). Rabbi Shmuel Bespalov, head of the Hasidim movement in Bobruisk,
was shot in 1941 when the city was captured by the Germans. Cantor Gershon
Sirota, whose performance had once caught the attention of Nicholas II and
who performed yearly in St. Petersburg and Moscow, died in 1941 in Warsaw.
There were two brothers Paul and Vladimir Mintz: Paul, the elder, was a
prominent Latvian politician, the only Jew in the government of Latvia.
Vladimir was a surgeon, who had been entrusted with the treatment of Lenin in
1918 after the assassination attempt. From 1920 he lived in Latvia. In 1940 the
Soviet occupation authorities arrested Paul Mintz and placed him in a camp in
Krasnoyarsk Krai, where he died early on. The younger brother lived in Riga
and was not touched. He died in 1945 at Bchenwald. Sabina Shpilreyn, a
doctor of medicine, psychoanalyst and a close colleague of Carl Jung, returned
to Russia in 1923 after working in clinics in Zurich, Munich, Berlin and
Geneva;in 1942 she was shot along with other Jews by Germans in her native
Rostov-on-Don. (In Chapter 19, we wrote about the deaths of her three scientist
brothers during Stalins terror.)
Yet many were saved from death by evacuation in 1941 and 1942. Various
Jewish wartime and postwar sources do not doubt the dynamism of this
evacuation. For example, in The Jewish World, a book written in 1944, one can
read: The Soviet authorities were fully aware that the Jews were the most
endangered part of the population, and despite the acute military needs in
transport, thousands of trains were provided for their evacuation. In many
cities Jews were evacuated first, although the author believes that the
statement of the Jewish writer David Bergelson that approximately 80% of
Jews were successfully evacuated2558 is an exaggeration. Bergelson wrote: In
Chernigov, the pre-war Jewish population was estimated at 70,000 people and
only 10,000 of them remained by the time the Germans arrived. In
Dnepropetrovsk, out of the original Jewish population of 100,000 only 30,000
remained when the Germans took the city. In Zhitomir, out of 50,000 Jews, no
less than 44,000 left.2559 In the Summer 1946 issue of the bulletin, Hayasa
E.M. Kulisher wrote: There is no doubt that the Soviet authorities took special
measures to evacuate the Jewish population or to facilitate its unassisted flight.
Along with the state personnel and industrial workers, Jews were given priority
[in the evacuation] The Soviet authorities provided thousands of trains
specifically for the evacuation of Jews.2560 Also, as a safer measure to avoid
bombing raids, Jews were evacuated by thousands of haywagons, taken from
kolkhozes and sovkhozes [collective farms] and driven over to railway
junctions in the rear. B.T. Goldberg, a son-in-law of Sholem Aleichem and then
a correspondent for the Jewish newspaper Der Tog from New York, after a
1946-1947 winter trip to the Soviet Union wrote an article about the wartime
evacuation of Jews (Der Tog, February 21, 1947). His sources in Ukraine, Jews
and Christians, the military and evacuees, all stated that the policy of the
authorities was to give the Jews a preference during evacuation, to save as many
of them as possible so that the Nazis would not destroy them. 2561 And Moshe
Kaganovich, a former Soviet partisan, in his by then foreign memoirs (1948)
confirms that the Soviet government provided for the evacuation of Jews all
available vehicles in addition to trains, including trains of haywagons and the
orders were to evacuate first and foremost the citizens of Jewish nationality

2558. . - // : .
2 ( -2). -: -, 1944. . 225-226.
2559.. . //
. 1917-1967 ( -2). -:
, 1968, . 89, 92.
2560Rescue: Information Bulletin of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS),
July-August 1946 (Vol. Ill, 7-8), p. 2. . : . .
(1939-1965). -: .
, 1966, . 45.
2561. . *, . 55.
from the areas threatened by the enemy.(Note that S. Schwartz and later
researchers dispute the existence of such orders, as well as the general policy of
Soviet authorities to evacuate Jews as such.2562)
Nevertheless, both earlier and later sources provide fairly consistent
estimates of the number of Jews who were evacuated or fled without assistance
from the German-occupied territories. Official Soviet figures are not available;
all researchers complain that the contemporaneous statistics are at best
approximate. Let us rely then on the works of the last decade. A demographer
M. Kupovetskiy, who used formerly unavailable archival materials and novel
techniques of analysis, offers the following assessment. According to the 1939
census, 3,028,538 Jews lived in the USSR within its old (that is, pre-1939-
1940) boundaries. With some corrections to this figure and taking into account
the rate of natural increase of the Jewish population from September 1939 to
June 1941 (he analyzed each territory separately), this researcher suggests that
at the outbreak of the war approximately 3,080,000 Jews resided within the old
USSR borders. Of these, 900,000 resided in the territories which would not be
occupied by Germans, and at the beginning of the war 2,180, 000 Jews
(Eastern Jews)2563 resided in the territories later occupied by the Germans.
There is no exact data regarding the number of Jews who fled or were
evacuated to the East before the German occupation. Though based on some
studies , we know that approximately 1,000,000 -1,100,000 Jews managed to
escape from the Eastern regions later occupied by Germans.2564
There was a different situation in the territories incorporated into the Soviet
Union only in 1939-1940, and which were rapidly captured by the Germans at
the start of the Blitzkreig. The lightning-speed German attack allowed almost
no chance for escape; meanwhile the Jewish population of these buffer zones
numbered 1,885,000 (Western Jews) in June 1941. 2565 And only a small
number of these Jews managed to escape or were evacuated. It is believed that
the number is about 10-12 percent.2566
Thus, within the new borders of the USSR, by the most optimistic
assessments, approximately 2,226,000 Jews (2,000,000 Eastern, 226,000
Western Jews) escaped the German occupation and 2,739,000 Jews (1,080,000
Easterners and 1,659,000 Westerners) remained in the occupied territories.
Evacuees and refugees from the occupied and threatened territories were
sent deep into the rear, with the majority of Jews resettled beyond the Ural

2562 . -.
, 1948, . 188. . : . . , . 45-46.
2563. .
//
. 1995, 2(9), . 137, 145, 151.
2564 . : (1933-1945): . .
: -, 1990 ( . . ), . 62.
2565. . // -
, 1995, 2(9), . 145.
2566. . , . 61.
Mountains, in particular in Western Siberia and also in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan.2567 The materials of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
(EAK) contain the following statement: At the beginning of the Patriotic War
about one and half million Jews were evacuated to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and
other Central Asian Republics.2568 This figure does not include the Volga, the
Ural and the Siberian regions. (However, the Jewish Encyclopedia argues that
a 1,500,000 figure is a great exaggeration.2569) Still, there was no organized
evacuation into Birobidzhan, and no individual refugees relocated there,
although, because of the collapse of Jewish kolkhozes, the vacated housing
there could accommodate up to 11,000 families.2570 At the same time, the
Jewish colonists in the Crimea were evacuated so much ahead of time that they
were able to take with them all livestock and farm implements; moreover, it is
well-known that in the spring of 1942, Jewish colonists from Ukraine
established kolkhozes in the Volga region How? Well, the author calls it the
irony of Nemesis: they were installed in place of German colonists who were
exiled from the German Republic of the Volga by Soviet government order
starting on August 28, 1941.2571
As already noted, all the cited wartime and postwar sources agree in
recognizing the energy and the scale of the organized evacuation of Jews from
the advancing German army. But the later sources, from the end of the 1940s,
began to challenge this. For example, we read in a 1960s source: a planned
evacuation of Jews as the most endangered part of the population did not take
place anywhere in Russia (italicized as in the source).2572 And twenty years
later we read this: after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, contrary to
the rumors that the government allegedly evacuated Jews from the areas under
imminent threat of German occupation, no such measures had ever taken place.
the Jews were abandoned to their fate. When applied to the citizen of Jewish
nationality, the celebrated `proletarian internationalism was a dead letter. 2573
This statement is completely unfair.
Still, even those Jewish writers, who deny the beneficence of the
government with respect to Jewish evacuation, do recognize its magnitude.
Due to the specific social structure of the Jewish population, the percentage of
Jews among the evacuees should have been much higher than the percentage of
Jews in the urban population.2574 And indeed it was. The Evacuation Council
was established on June 24, 1941, just two days after the German invasion
2567. . , . 181.
2568.. . : *. .:
, 2001, . 431.
2569 ( ). :
, 1988. . 4, . 167.
2570.. . // -2, . 187.
2571. . - // -2, . 226, 227.
2572. . // -2, . 144.
2573. . , // :
. -, 1987, 96, . 151-152.
2574. . - // -2, . 224.
(Shvernik was the chairman and Kosygin and Pervukhin were his deputies) .Its
priorities were announced as the following: to evacuate first and foremost the
state and party agencies with personnel, industries, and raw materials along with
the workers of evacuated plants and their families, and young people of
conscription age. Between the beginning of the war and November 1941,
around 12 million people were evacuated from the threatened areas to the
rear.2575 This number included, as we have seen, 1,000,000 to 1,100,000 Eastern
Jews and more than 200,000 Western Jews from the soon-to-be-occupied areas.
In addition, we must add to this figure a substantial number of Jews among the
people evacuated from the cities and regions of the Russian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic (RSFSR, that is, Russia proper) that never fell to the
Germans (in particular, those from Moscow and Leningrad). Solomon
Schwartz states: The general evacuation of state agencies and industrial
enterprises with a significant portion of their staff (often with families) was in
many places very extensive. Thanks to the social structure of Ukrainian Jewry
with a significant percentages of Jews among the middle and top civil servants,
including the academic and technical intelligentsia and the substantial
proportion of Jewish workers in Ukrainian heavy industry, the share of Jews
among the evacuees was larger than their share in the urban (and even more
than in the total) population.2576
The same was true for Byelorussia. In the 1920s and early 1930s it was
almost exclusively Jews, both young and old, who studied at various courses,
literacy classes, in day schools, evening schools and shift schools. This
enabled the poor from Jewish villages to join the ranks of industrial workers.
Constituting only 8.9% of the population of Byelorussia, Jews accounted for
36% of the industrial workers of the republic in 1930.2577
The rise of the percentage of Jews among the evacuees, continues S.
Schwartz, was also facilitated by the fact that for many employees and workers
the evacuation was not mandatory. Therefore, many, mostly non-Jews,
remained were they were. Thus, even the Jews, who did not fit the criteria for
mandatory evacuation had better chances to evacuate.2578 However, the
author also notes that no government orders or instructions on the evacuation
specifically of Jews or reports about it ever appeared in the Soviet press.
There simply were no orders regarding the evacuation of Jews specifically. It
means that there was no purposeful evacuation of Jews.2579
Keeping in mind the Soviet reality, this conclusion seems ill grounded and,
in any case, formalistic. Indeed, reports about mass evacuation of the Jews did
not appear in the Soviet press. It is easy to understand why. First, after the pact

2575 : [.]. ., 1988, .

139.
2576. . , . 53.
2577.. .
(1941 -1945). ., 1995, . 13.
2578. . , . 53.
2579 , . 46, 53.
with Germany, the Soviet Union suppressed information about Hitlers policies
towards Jews, and when the war broke out, the bulk of the Soviet population
did not know about the mortal danger the German invasion posed for Jews.
Second, and this was probably the more-important factor German propaganda
vigorously denounced Judeo-Bolshevism and the Soviet leadership
undoubtedly realized that they gave a solid foundation to this propaganda
during the 1920s and 1930s, so how could they now declare openly and loudly
that the foremost government priority must be to save Jews? This could only
have been seen as playing into Hitlers hands.
Therefore, there were no public announcements that among the evacuees
Jews were over-represented. The evacuation orders did not mention Jews,
yet during the evacuation the Jews were not discriminated against;2580 on the
contrary they were evacuated by all available means, but in silence, without
press coverage inside the USSR. However, propaganda for foreign consumption
was a different matter. For example, in December 1941, after repulsing the
German onslaught on Moscow, Radio Moscow not in the Russian language,
of course, but in Polish, and on the next day, five more times in German,
compared the successful Russian winter counteroffensive with the Maccabean
miracle and told the German-speaking listeners repeatedly that precisely
during Hanukkah week, the 134th Nuremberg Division, named after the city
where the racial legislation originated was destroyed. 2581 In 1941- 42 the
Soviet authorities readily permitted worshippers to overfill synagogues in
Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov and to openly celebrate the Jewish Passover
of 1942.2582
We cannot say that the domestic Soviet press treated German atrocities with
silence. Ilya Ehrenburg and others (like the journalist Kriger) got the go-ahead
to maintain and inflame hatred towards Germans throughout the entire war and
not without mentioning the burning topic of Jewish suffering, yet without a
special stress on it. Throughout the war Ehrenburg thundered, that the German
is a beast by his nature, calling for not sparing even unborn Fascists
(meaning the murder of pregnant German women), and he was checked only at
the very end, when the war reached the territory of Germany and it became clear
that the Army had embraced only too well the party line of unbridled revenge
against all Germans.
However these is no doubt that the Nazi policy of extermination of the
Jews, its predetermination and scope, was not sufficiently covered by the Soviet
press, so that even the Jewish masses in the Soviet Union could hardly realize
the extent of their danger. Indeed, during the entire war, there were few public
statements about the fate of Jews under German occupation. Stalin in his speech
on Nov. 6, 1941 (the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution) said: The

2580. . // -
, 1995, 2(9), . 23.
2581. . - // -2, . 238.
2582 , . 237.
Nazis are as eager to organize medieval Jewish pogroms as the Tsarist
regime was. The Nazi Party is the party of medieval reaction and the Black-
Hundred pogroms.2583 As far as we know, an Israeli historian writes, it was
the only case during the entire war when Stalin publicly mentioned the
Jews.2584 On January 6, 1942, in a note of the Narkomindel [Peoples
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs] composed by Molotov and addressed to all
states that maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the Jews are
mentioned as one of many suffering Soviet nationalities, and shootings of Jews
in Kiev, Lvov, Odessa, Kamenetz-Podolsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol, Kerch
were highlighted and the numbers of victims listed. The terrible massacre and
pogroms were inflicted by German invaders in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
A significant number of Jews, including women and children, were rounded up;
before the execution all of them were stripped naked and beaten and then
shot by sub-machine guns. Many mass murders occurred in other Ukrainian
cities, and these bloody executions were directed in particular against unarmed
and defenseless Jews from the working class.2585 On December 19, 1942, the
Soviet government issued a declaration that mentioned Hitlers special plan for
total extermination of the Jewish population in the occupied territories of
Europe and in Germany itself; although relatively small, the Jewish minority
of the Soviet population suffered particularly hard from the savage
bloodthirstiness of the Nazi monsters. But some sources point out that this
declaration was somewhat forced; it came out two days after a similar
declaration was made by the western Allies, and it was not republished in the
Soviet press as was always done during newspaper campaigns. In 1943, out of
seven reports of the Extraordinary State Commission for investigation of Nazi
atrocities (such as extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and the destruction
of cultural artifacts of our country), only one report referred to murders of Jews
in the Stavropol region, near Mineralnye Vody.2586 And in March 1944 in Kiev,
while making a speech about the suffering endured by Ukrainians under
occupation, Khrushchev did not mention Jews at all.2587
Probably this is true. Indeed, the Soviet masses did not realize the scale of
the Jewish Catastrophe. Overall, this was our common fate to live under the
impenetrable shell of the USSR and be ignorant of what was happening in the
outside world. However, Soviet Jews could not be all that unaware about the
events in Germany. In the mid-thirties the Soviet Press wrote a lot about
German anti-Semitism A novel by Leon Feichtwanger The Oppenheim
Family and the movie based on the book, as well as another movie, Professor

2583 . ..
6 1941
// , 1941, 7 , . 1-2.
2584. . // -
, 1995, 2(9), . 17.
2585, 1942, 7 , . 1-2.
2586. . *, . 138-145.
2587. . // -2, . 146.
Mamlock, clearly demonstrated the dangers that Jews were facing. 2588
Following the pogroms of Kristallnacht, Pravda published an editorial The
Fascist Butchers and Cannibals in which it strongly condemned the Nazis:
The whole civilized world watches with disgust and indignation the vicious
massacre of the defenseless Jewish population by German fascists. [With the
same feelings] the Soviet people watch the dirty and bloody events in Germany.
In the Soviet Union, along with the capitalists and landowners, all sources of
anti-Semitism had been wiped out. 2589 Then, throughout the whole November,
Pravda printed daily on its front pages reports such as Jewish pogroms in
Germany, Beastly vengeance on Jews, The wave of protests around the
world against the atrocities of the fascist thugs. Protest rallies against anti-
Jewish policies of Hitler were held in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tbilisi, Minsk,
Sverdlovsk, and Stalin. Pravda published a detailed account of the town hall
meeting of the Moscow intelligentsia in the Great Hall of the Conservatory,
with speeches given by A.N. Tolstoy, A. Korneychuk, L. Sobolev; Peoples
Artists [a Soviet title signifying prominence in the Arts] A.B. Goldenweiser and
S.M. Mikhoels, and also the text of a resolution adopted at the meeting: We,
the representatives of the Moscow intelligentsia raise our voice in outrage
and condemnation against the Nazi atrocities and inhuman acts of violence
against the defenseless Jewish population of Germany. The fascists beat up,
maim, rape, kill and burn alive in broad daylight people who are guilty only of
belonging to the Jewish nation.2590 The next day, on November 29, under the
headline Soviet intelligentsia is outraged by Jewish pogroms in Germany,
Pravda produced the full coverage of rallies in other Soviet cities.
However, from the moment of the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact
in August of 1939, not only criticism of Nazi policies but also any information
about persecution of the Jews in European countries under German control
vanished from the Soviet press. A lot of messages were reaching the Soviet
Union through various channels intelligence, embassies, Soviet journalists.
An important source of information was Jewish refugees who managed to
cross the Soviet border. However, the Soviet media, including the Jewish press,
maintained silence.2591
When the Soviet-German War started and the topic of Nazi anti-Semitism
was raised again, many Jews considered it to be propaganda, argues a modern
scholar, relying on the testimonies of the Catastrophe survivors, gathered over a
half of century. Many Jews relied on their own life experience rather than on
radio, books and newspapers. The image of Germans did not change in the
minds of most Jews since WWI. And back then the Jews considered the German

2588. . //
-, 1995, 2(9), . 47.
2589, 1938, 18 , . 1.
2590, 1938, 28 , . 2-3.
2591. . // -
, 1995, 2(9), . 15-16.
regime to be one of the most tolerant to them.2592 Many Jews remembered,
that during the German occupation in 1918, the Germans treated Jews better
than they treated the rest of the local population, and so the Jews were
reassured.2593 As a result, in 1941, a significant number of Jews remained in
the occupied territories voluntarily. And even in 1942, according to the stories
of witnesses the Jews in Voronezh, Rostov, Krasnodar, and other cities waited
for the front to roll through their city and hoped to continue their work as
doctors and teachers, tailors and cobblers, which they believed were always
needed. The Jews could not or would not evacuate for purely material reasons
as well.2594
While the Soviet press and radio censored the information about the
atrocities committed by the occupiers against the Jews, the Yiddish newspaper
Einigkeit (Unity), the official publication of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee (EAK), was allowed to write about it openly from the summer of
1942. Apparently, the first step in the establishment of EAK was a radio-
meeting in August 1941of representatives of the Jewish people (S. Mikhoels,
P. Marques, J. Ohrenburg, S. Marshak, S. Eisenstein and other celebrities
participated.) For propaganda purposes, it was broadcast to the US and other
Allied countries. The effect on the Western public surpassed the most
optimistic expectations of Moscow. In the Allied countries the Jewish
organizations sprang up to raise funds for the needs of the Red Army. Their
success prompted the Kremlin to establish a permanent Jewish Committee in
the Soviet Union. Thus began the seven-year-long cooperation of the Soviet
authorities with global Zionism.2595
The development of the Committee was a difficult process, heavily
dependent on the attitudes of government. In September 1941, an influential
former member of the Bund, Henryk Ehrlich, was released from the prison to
lead that organization. In 1917, Ehrlich had been a member of the notorious and
then omnipotent Executive Committee of the Petrosoviet. Later, he emigrated to
Poland where he was captured by the Soviets in 1939. He and his comrade,
Alter, who also used to be a member of the Bund and was also a native of
Poland, began preparing a project that aimed to mobilize international Jewish
opinion, with heavier participation of foreign rather than Soviet Jews. Polish
Bund members were intoxicated by their freedom and increasingly acted
audaciously. Evacuated to Kuibyshev [Samara] along with the metropolitan
bureaucracy, they contacted Western diplomatic representatives, who were
relocated there as well, suggesting, in particular, to form a Jewish Legion in
the USA to fight on the Soviet-German front. The things have gone so far that
the members of the Polish Bund began planning a trip to the West on their
own. In addition, both Bund activists presumptuously assumed (and did not
2592. . //
-, 1995, 2(9), . 47-48.
2593, . 8, . 223.
2594 , . 49.
2595. . , . 231.
hide it) that they could liberally reform the Soviet political system. In
December 1941, both overreaching leaders of the Committee were arrested
(Ehrlich hanged himself in prison; Alter was shot).2596
Yet during the spring of 1942, the project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee was revived, and a meeting of the representatives of Jewish
people was called forth again. A Committee was elected, although this time
exclusively from Soviet Jews. Solomon Mikhoels became its Chairman and
Shakhno Epstein, Stalins eye `in Jewish affairs and a former fanatical Bundist
and later a fanatical Chekist, became its Executive Secretary. Among others,
its members were authors David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Leib Kvitko, and
Der Nistor; scientists Lina Shtern and Frumkin, a member of the Academy. Poet
Itzik Fefer became the Vice President.2597 (The latter was a former Trotskyite
who was pardoned because he composed odes dedicated to Stalin; he was an
important NKVD agent, and, as a proven secret agent, he was entrusted with
a trip to the West.2598) The task of this Committee was the same: to influence
international public opinion, and to appeal to the Jews all over the world but
in practice it appealed primarily to the American Jews, 2599 building up
sympathy and raising financial aid for the Soviet Union. (And it was the main
reason for Mikhoels and Fefers trip to the United States in summer 1943,
which coincided with the dissolution of Comintern. It was a roaring success,
triggering rallies in 14 cities across the US: 50,000 people rallied in New York
City alone. Mikhoels and Fefer were received by former Zionist leader Chaim
Weizmann and by Albert Einstein.2600) Yet behind the scenes the Committee was
managed by Lozovskiy-Dridzo, the Deputy Head of the Soviet Information
Bureau (Sovinformbureau); the Committee did not have offices in the Soviet
Union and could not act independently; in fact, it was not so much a
fundraising tool for the Red Army as an arm of pro-Soviet propaganda
abroad.2601

Some Jewish authors argue that from the late 1930s there was a covert but
persistent removal of Jews from the highest ranks of Soviet leadership in all
spheres of administration. For instance, D. Shub writes that by 1943 not a single
Jew remained among the top leadership of the NKVD, though there were still
many Jews in the Commissariat of Trade, Industry and Foods. There were also
quite a few Jews in the Commissariat of Public Education and in the Foreign

2596.. . , . 233-235.
2597. . // -2, . 148.
2598 . : : 1930-1950 . .: -
, 1997, . 465, 470.
2599. . , . 239.
2600.. . , . 237-239.
2601. . , . 166-170.
Office.2602 A modern researcher reaches a different conclusion based on
archival materials that became available in 1990s: During the 1940s, the role
of Jews in punitive organs remained highly visible, coming to the end only in
the postwar years during the campaign against cosmopolitanism.2603
However, there are no differences of opinion regarding the relatively large
numbers of Jews in the top command positions in the Army. The Jewish World
reported that in the Red Army now [during the war], there are over a hundred
Jewish generals and it provided a small randomly picked list of such
generals, not including generals from the infantry. There were 17 names
(ironically, Major-General of Engineering Service Frenkel Naftaliy Aronovich
of GULag was also included).2604 A quarter of a century later, another collection
of documents confirmed that there were no less than a hundred Jewish generals
in the middle of the war and provided additional names.2605 (However, the
volume unfortunately omitted the Super-General Lev Mekhlis the closest
and most trusted of Stalins henchmen from 1937 to 1940; from 1941 he was
the Head of Political Administration of the Red Army. Ten days after the start of
the war, Mekhlis arrested a dozen of the highest generals of the Western
Front.2606 He is also infamous for his punitive measures during the Soviet-
Finnish War and then later at Kerch in the Crimea.)
The Short Jewish Encyclopedia provides an additional list of fifteen Jewish
generals. Recently, an Israeli researcher has published a list of Jewish generals
and admirals (including those who obtained the rank during the war).
Altogether, there were 270 generals and admirals! This is not only not a few
this is an immense number indeed. He also notes four wartime narkoms
(peoples commissars): in addition to Kaganovich, these were Boris Vannikov
(ammunition), Semien Ginzburg (construction), Isaac Zaltzman (tank industry)
and several heads of main military administrations of the Red Army; the list
also contains the names of four Jewish army commanders, commanders of 23
corps, 72 divisions, and 103 brigades.2607
In no army of the Allies, not even in the USAs, did Jews occupy such high
positions, as in the Soviet Army, Dr. I. Arad writes.2608 No, the displacement
of Jews from the top posts during the war did not happen. Nor had any
supplanting yet manifested itself in general aspects of Soviet life. In 1944 (in
the USA) a famous Socialist Mark Vishnyak stated that not even hardcore
2602. . // -2, . 145.
2603.. . - 20- //
: / .-. .. . ;
: , 1999, . 344.
2604. . // -2, . 243-245.
2605. . //-2, . 143.
2606. . // , 1991, 6-7, . 31;
( ). 2- ., . . ., 1995. . 2, . 276-
277.
2607 . :
. -, 1992. . 2, . 536-578.
2608. . , . 93.
enemies of the USSR can say that its government cultivates anti-Semitism. 2609
Back then it was undoubtedly true.
According to Einigkeit (from February 24, 1945, almost at the end of the
war), for courage and heroism in combat 63,374 Jews were awarded orders
and medals, and 59 Jews became the Heroes of the Soviet Union. According to
the Warsaw Yiddish language newspaper Volksstimme in 1963 the number of the
Jews awarded military decorations in WWII was 160,772, with 108 Heroes of
the Soviet Union among them.2610 In the early 1990s, an Israeli author provided
a list of names with dates of confirmation , in which 135 Jews are listed as
Heroes of the Soviet Union and 12 Jews are listed as the full chevaliers of the
Order of Glory.2611 We find similar information in the three-volume Essays on
Jewish Heroism.2612 And finally, the latest archival research (2001) provides the
following figures: throughout the war 123,822 Jews were awarded military
decorations;2613 thus, among all nationalities of the Soviet Union, the Jews are
in fifth place among the recipients of decorations, after Russians, Ukrainians,
Byelorussians and Tatars.
I. Arad states that anti-Semitism as an obstacle for Jews in their military
careers, in promotion to higher military ranks and insignia did not exist in the
Soviet Army during the war.2614 Production on the home front for the needs of
the war was also highly rewarded. A huge influx of Soviet Jews into science
and technology during the 1930s had borne its fruit during the war. Many Jews
worked on the design of new types of armaments and instrumentation, in the
manufacturing of warplanes, tanks, and ships, in scientific research,
construction and development of industrial enterprises, in power engineering,
metallurgy, and transport. For their work from 1941 to 1945 in support of the
front, 180,000 Jews were awarded decorations. Among them were scientists,
engineers, administrators of various managerial levels and workers, including
more than two hundred who were awarded the Order of Lenin; nearly three
hundred Jews were awarded the Stalin Prize in science and technology. During
the war, 12 Jews became Heroes of Socialist Labor, eight Jews became full
members of the Academy of Science in physics and mathematics, chemistry and
technology, and thirteen became Member-Correspondents of the Academy.2615

2609. . // -2, . 98.

2610. . // -2, . 143.
2611. . . . 2, . 548-555.
2612 : 3 . / . .. , .. . ; -
, 1994-1997.
2613.. . , . 245 ( .
, . . 17, . 125, . .
127, . 220).
2614. . , . 128.
2615.. . , . 18, 444-445, 452,
474-475.
Many authors, including S. Schwartz, note that the role of Jews in the war was
systematically concealed along with a deliberate policy of silence about the
role of Jews in the war. He cites as a proof the works of prominent Soviet
writers such as K. Simonov (Days and Nights) and V. Grossman (The People Is
Immortal) where among a vast number of surnames of soldiers, officers,
political officers and others, there is not a single Jewish name.2616 Of course,
this was due to censoring restrictions, especially in case of Grossman. (Later,
military personnel with Jewish names re-appeared in Grossmans essays.)
Another author notes that postcards depicting a distinguished submarine
commander, Israel Fisanovich, were sold widely throughout the Soviet
Union.2617 Later, such publications were extended; and an Israeli researcher lists
another 12 Jews, Heroes of the Soviet Union, whose portraits were mass
reproduced on postal envelopes.2618
Even through Im a veteran of that war, I have not researched it through
books much, nor was I collecting materials or have written anything about it.
But I saw Jews on the front. I knew brave men among them. For instance, I
especially want to mention two fearless antitank fighters: one of them was my
university friend Lieutenant Emanuel Mazin; another was young ex-student
soldier Borya Gammerov (both were wounded in action). In my battery among
60 people two were Jews Sergeant Ilya Solomin, who fought very well
through the whole war, and Private Pugatch, who soon slipped away to the
Political Department. Among twenty officers of our division one was a Jew
Major Arzon, the head of the supply department. Poet Boris Slutsky was a real
soldier, he used to say: Im full of bullet holes. Major Lev Kopelev, even
though he served in the Political Department of the Army (responsible for
counter-propaganda aimed at enemy troops), he fearlessly threw himself in
every possible fighting melee. A former Mifliyetz Semyon Freylih, a brave
officer, remembers: The war began . So I was off to the draft board and
joined the army without graduating from the University, as we felt ashamed
not to share the hardships of millions.2619 Or take Lazar Lazarev, later a well-
known literary critic, who as a young man fought at the front for two years until
both his hands were mauled: It was our duty and we would have been ashamed
to evade it. it was life the only possible one under the circumstances, the
only decent choice for the people of my age and education.2620 Boris Izrailevich
Feinerman wrote in 1989 in response to an article in Book Review, that as a 17-
year-old, he volunteered in July 1941 for an infantry regiment; in October, his
both legs were wounded and he was taken prisoner of war; he escaped and
walked out of the enemys encirclement on crutches then of course he was

2616. . , . 154-156.
2617. . // -2, . 250.
2618. . . . 2, . 562.
2619S. Freilikh, Istoriia odnogo boia... [Histoire d'un combat], Kinostsenarii [Scnarios de
films]. M., 1990, n" 3. p. 132.
2620L Lazarev, Zapiski pojilogo tcheloveka [Notes d'un homme g], in Znamia, 2001, n"6, p.
167.
imprisoned for `treason but in 1943 he managed to get out of the camp by
joining a penal platoon; he fought there and later became a machine gunner of
the assault infantry unit in a tank regiment and was wounded two more times.
We can find many examples of combat sacrifice in the biographical
volumes of the most recent Russian Jewish Encyclopedia. Shik Kordonskiy, a
commander of a mine and torpedo regiment, smashed his burning plane into
the enemy cargo ship; he was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Wolf Korsunsky, navigator of the air regiment, became a Hero of the Soviet
Union too. Victor Hasin, a Hero of the Soviet Union squadron commander
participated in 257 air skirmishes, personally shot down a number of the
enemys airplanes, destroyed another 10 on the ground; he was shot down over
the enemy occupied territory, and spent several days reaching and crossing the
front lines. He died in hospital from his wounds. One cannot express it better!
The Encyclopedia contains several dozens names of Jews who died in combat.
Yet, despite these examples of unquestioned courage, a Jewish scholar
bitterly notes the widespread belief in the army and in the rear that Jews
avoided the combat units.2621 This is a noxious and painful spot. But, if you
wish to ignore the painful spots, do not attempt to write a book about ordeals
that were endured together.
In history, mutual national perceptions do count. During the last war, anti-
Semitism in Russia increased significantly. Jews were unjustly accused of
evasion of military service and in particular, of evasion of front line service. 2622
It was often said about Jews that instead of fighting, they stormed the cities of
Alma-Ata and Tashkent.2623 Here is a testimony of a Polish Jew who fought in
the Red Army: In the army, young and old had been trying to convince me that
there was not a single Jew on the front . `Weve got to fight for them. I was
told in a `friendly manner: `Youre crazy. All your people are safely sitting at
home. How come you are here on the front? 2624 I. Arad writes: Expressions
such as `we are at the front, and the Jews are in Tashkent, `one never sees a Jew
at the front linecould be heard among soldiers and civilians alike.2625 I testify:
Yes, one could hear this among the soldiers on the front. And right after the
war who has not experienced that? a painful feeling remained among our
Slavs that our Jews could have acted in that war in a more self-sacrificing
manner, that among the lower ranks on the front the Jews could have been more
represent.
These feelings are easy to blame (and they are blamed indeed) on
unwarranted Russian anti-Semitism.(However, many sources blame that on the

2621S. Schwartz, Les Juifs en Union sovitique..., p. 154.

2622Dr. Jerzy Gliksman. Jewish Exiles in Soviet Russia (1939-1943). part 2, July 1947, p. 17,
in Archives du Comit juif amricain de New York, cit d'aprs S. Schwartz, p. 157.
2623PEJ. t. 8. p. 223.
2624Rachel Erlich. Summary Report on Eighteen Intensive Interviews with Jewish DP's from
Poland and the Soviet Union, October 1948. p. 27 [Archives du Comit juif amricain de
New York], cit d'aprs S. Schwartz. p. 192.
2625. . , . 128.
German propaganda digested by our public. What a people! They are good
only to absorb propaganda be it Stalins or Hitlers and they are good for
nothing else!) Now that it is half a century passed since then. Isnt it time to
unscramble the issue?
There are no official data available on the ethnic composition of the Soviet
Army during the Second World War. Therefore, most studies on Jewish
participation in the war provide only estimates, often without citation of sources
or explanation of the methods of calculation. However, we can say that the
500,000 figure had been firmly established by 1990s: The Jewish people
supplied the Red Army with nearly 500,000 soldiers. 2626 During World War II,
550,000 Jews served in the Red Army.2627 The Short Jewish Encyclopedia
notes that only in the field force of the Soviet Army alone there were over
500,000 Jews, and these figures do not include Jewish partisans who fought
against Nazi Germany.2628 The same figures are cited in Essays on Jewish
heroism, in Abramovichs book In the Deciding War and in other sources.
We came across only one author who attempted to justify his assessment by
providing readers with details of his reasoning. It was an Israeli researcher, I.
Arad, in his the above cited book on the Catastrophe.
Arad concludes that the total number of Jews who fought in the ranks of
the Soviet Army against the German Nazis was no less than 420,000-
430,000.2629 He includes in this number the thousands of Jewish partisans who
fought against the German invaders in the woods (they were later incorporated
into the regular army in 1944 after the liberation of Western Byelorussia and
Western Ukraine. At the same time, Arad believes that during the war
approximately 25,000-30,000 Jewish partisans operated in the occupied areas
of the Soviet Union.2630 (The Israeli Encyclopedia in the article Anti-Nazi
Resistance provides a lower estimate: In the Soviet Union, more than 15,000
Jews fought against the Nazis in the underground organizations and partisan
units.2631) In his calculations, Arad assumes that the proportion of mobilized
Jews was the same as the average percentage of mobilized for the entire
population of USSR during the war, i.e., 13.0-13.5%. This would yield
390,000-405,000 Eastern Jews (out of the total of slightly more than 3 million),
save for the fact that in certain areas of Ukraine and Byelorussia, the
percentage of Jewish population was very high; these people were not
mobilized because the region was quickly captured by the Germans. However,

2626. . // -2, . 240.

2627. . , // 22:
-
. -, 1984, 34, . 146.
2628, . 1, , . 690; . 4, . , . 159. .
(. 8, . 224) 450 .
, 25-30 . .
2629. . , . 102.
2630. . , . 86.
2631, . 8, . 441.
the author assumes that in general the mobilization shortfall of the Eastern
Jews was small and that before the Germans came, the majority of males of
military age were still mobilized and thus he settles on the number of
370,000-380,000 Eastern Jews who served in the army. Regarding Western
Jews, Arad reminds us that in 1940 in Western Byelorussia and Western
Ukraine, during the mobilization of conscripts whose year of birth fell between
of 1919 and 1922, approximately 30,000 Jewish youths were enlisted, but the
Soviet government considered the soldiers from the newly annexed western
regions as unreliable; therefore, almost all of them were transferred to the
Labor Army after the war began. By the end of 1943, the process of re-
mobilization of those who were previously transferred into the Labor Army
began and there were Jews among them. The author mentions that 6,000 to
7,000 Western Jewish refugees fought in the national Baltic divisions. By
adding the Jewish partisans incorporated into the army in 1944, the author
concludes: we can establish that at least 50,000 Jews from the territories
annexed to the USSR, including those mobilized before the war, served in the
Red Army. Thus I. Arad comes to the overall number of 420,000-430,000 Jews
in military service between 1941 and 1944.2632
According to Arad, the number of 500,000 soldiers commonly used in the
sources would imply a general base (500,000 conscripts taken out of the entire
Jewish population) of 3,700,000-3,850,000 people. According to the above-
mentioned sources, the maximum estimate for the total number of Eastern and
Western Jews who escaped the German occupation was 2,226,000, and even if
we were to add to this base all 1,080,000 Eastern Jews who remained under the
occupation, as though they had had time to supply the army with all the people
of military age right before the arrival of the Germans which was not the case
the base would still lack a half-million people. It would have also meant that
the success of the evacuation, discussed above, was strongly underestimated.
There is no such contradiction in Arads assessment. And though its
individual components may require correction,2633 overall, it surprisingly well
matches with the hitherto unpublished data of the Institute of the Military
History, derived from the sources of the Central Archive of the Ministry of
Defense. According to that data, the numbers of mobilized personnel during the
Great Patriotic War were as follows:
Russians 19,650,000
Ukrainians 5,320,000
Byelorussians 964,000
Tartars 511,000
Jews 434,000
Kazakhs 341,000

2632. . , . 98-102.
2633, , ,
, ,
, , , , . .
Uzbeks 330,000
2634
Others 2,500,000
Thus, contrary to the popular belief, the number of Jews in the Red Army in
WWII was proportional to the size of mobilization base of the Jewish
population. The fraction of Jews that participated in the war in general matches
their proportion in the population.
So then, were the peoples impressions of the war really prompted by anti-
Semitic prejudice? Of course, by the beginning of the war, a certain part of the
older and middle-aged population still bore scars from the 1920s and 1930s. But
a huge part of the soldiers were young men who were born at the turn of the
revolution or after it; their perception of the world differed from that of their
elders dramatically. Compare: during the First World War, in spite of the spy
mania of the military authorities in 1915 against the Jews who resided near the
front lines, there was no evidence of anti-Semitism in the Russian army. In
1914, out of 5 million Russian Jews, 2635 by the beginning of WWI, about
400,000 Jews were inducted into the Russian Imperial Army, and by the end of
war in 1917 this number reached 500,000.2636 This means that at the outbreak
of the war every twelfth Russian Jew fought in the war, while by the end, one
out of ten. And in World War II, every eighth or seventh.
So, what was the matter? It can be assumed that the new disparities inside
the army played their role with their influences growing stronger and sharper as
one moved closer to the deadly frontline.
In 1874 Jews were granted equal rights with other Russian subjects
regarding universal conscription, yet during WWI until the February
Revolution, Tsar Alexander IIs law which stipulated that Jews could not
advance above the rank of petty officer (though it did not apply to military
medics) was still enforced. Under the Bolsheviks, the situation had changed
radically, and during the WWII, as the Israeli Encyclopedia summarizes,
compared to other nationalities of the Soviet Union, Jews were
disproportionately represented among the senior officers, mainly because of the
higher percentage of college graduates among them.2637 According to I. Arads
evaluation, the number of Jews-commissars and political officers in various
units during the war was relatively higher than number of Jews on other Army
positions; at the very least, the percentage of Jews in the political leadership
of the army was three times higher than the overall percentage of Jews among
the population of the USSR during that period.2638 In addition, of course, Jews
were among the head professionals of military medicine among the heads of
health departments on several fronts. Twenty-six Jewish generals of the

2634
30
. .: : 8 . .: , 2001. . 5. . 182.
2635, . 7, . 385.
2636, . 1, . 686.
2637 , . 686-687.
2638. . , . 118.
Medical Corps and nine generals of the Veterinary Corps were listed in the Red
Army. Thirty-three Jewish generals served in the Engineering Corps.2639 Of
course, Jewish doctors and military engineers occupied not only high offices:
among the military medical staff there were many Jews (doctors, nurses,
orderlies).2640 Let us recall that in 1926 the proportion of Jews among military
doctors was 18.6% while their proportion in the male population was 1.7%,2641
and this percentage could only increase during the war because of the large
number of female Jewish military doctors: traditionally, a high percentage of
Jews in the Soviet medicine and engineering professions naturally contributed
to their large number in the military units.2642
However undeniably important and necessary for final victory these
services were, what mattered is that not everybody could survive to see it.
Meanwhile an ordinary soldier, glancing back from the frontline, saw all too
clearly that even the second and third echelons behind the front were also
considered participants in the war: all those deep-rear headquarters, suppliers,
the whole Medical Corps from medical battalion to higher levels, numerous
behind-the-lines technical units and, of course, all kinds of service personnel
there, and, in addition, the entire army propaganda machine, including touring
ensembles, entertainment troupes they all were considered war veterans and,
indeed, it was apparent to everyone that the concentration of Jews was much
higher there than at the front lines. Some write that among Leningrads
veteran-writers, the Jews comprised by most cautious and perhaps
understated assessment 31%2643 that is, probably more. Yet how many of
them were editorial staff? As a rule, editorial offices were situated 10-15
kilometers behind the frontline, and even if a correspondent happened to be at
the front during hostilities, nobody would have forced him to hold the
position, he could leave immediately, which is a completely different
psychology. Many trumpeted their status as front-liners, but writers and
journalists are guilty of it the most. Stories of prominent ones deserve a separate
dedicated analysis. Yet how many others not prominent and not famous
front-liners settled in various newspaper publishing offices at all levels at
fronts, armies, corps and divisions? Here is one episode. After graduating from
the machine gun school, Second Lieutenant Alexander Gershkowitz was sent to
the front. But, after a spell at the hospital, while catching up with his unit, at a
minor railroad station he sensed the familiar smell of printing ink, followed it
and arrived at the office of a division-level newspaper, which serendipitously
was in need of a front-line correspondent. And his fate had changed. (But what

2639. . . . 2, 531-532.
2640, . 8, . 232.
2641. . , . 96.
2642 , . 126.
2643. . [ -. 1941-
1945 / . . . .: . , [1985] // : .-
, - . , 1987, 5,
. 138.
about catching up with his infantry unit?) In this new position, he traveled
thousands of kilometers of the war roads.. 2644 Of course, military journalists
perished in the war as well.
Musician Michael Goldstein, who got the white ticket (not fit) because
of poor vision, writes of himself: I always strived to be at the front, where I
gave thousands of concerts, where I wrote a number of military songs and
where I often dug trenches.2645 Often? Really? A visiting musician and with a
shovel in his hands? As a war veteran, I say an absolutely incredible picture.
Or here is another amazing biography. Eugeniy Gershuni in the summer of
1941 volunteered for a militia unit, where he soon organized a small pop
ensemble. Those, who know about these unarmed and even non-uniformed
columns marching to certain death, would be chilled. Ensemble, indeed! In
September 1941, Gershuni with his group of artists from the militia was posted
to Leningrads Red Army Palace, where he organized and headed a troop-
entertainment circus. The story ends on May 9, 1945, when Gershunis circus
threw a show on the steps of the Reichstag in Berlin.2646
Of course, the Jews fought in the infantry and on the frontline. In the
middle of the 1970s, a Soviet source provides data on the ethnic composition of
two hundred infantry divisions between January 1, 1943 and January 1, 1944
and compares it to the population share of each nationality within the pre-
September 1939 borders of the USSR.. During that period, Jews comprised
respectively 1.5% and 1.28% in those divisions, while their proportion in the
population in 1939 was 1.78%,2647 Only by the middle of 1944, when
mobilization began in the liberated areas, did the percentage of Jews fall to
1.14% because almost all Jews in those areas were exterminated.
It should be noted here that some audacious Jews took an even more
fruitful and energetic part in the war outside of the front. For example, the
famous Red Orchestra of Trepper and Gurevich spied on Hitlers regime from
within until the fall of 1942, passing to the Soviets extremely important
strategic and tactical information. (Both spies were arrested and held by the
Gestapo until the end of the war; then, after liberation, they were arrested and
imprisoned in the USSR Trepper for 10 years and Gurevich for 15 years. 2648)
Here is another example: a Soviet spy, Lev Manevich, was ex-commander of a
special detachment during the Civil War and later a long-term spy in Germany,
Austria, and Italy. In 1936, he was arrested in Italy, but he managed to
communicate with Soviet intelligence even from the prison. In 1943, while
imprisoned in the Nazi camps under the name of Colonel Starostin, he
participated in the anti-fascist underground. In 1945, he was liberated by the
Americans but died before returning to the USSR (where he could have easily
2644. // , 1992, 1 , . 18.
2645. // , 1968, 1 , . 10.
2646, . 1, . 296-297.
2647.. .
. .: , 1975, . 58-59.
2648, . 8, . 1051; . . , . 217-228.
faced imprisonment). Only 20 years later, in 1965, was he awarded the title of
Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously. 2649 (One can also find very strange
biographies, such as Mikhail Scheinmans. Since the 1920s he served as a
provincial secretary of the Komsomol; during the most rampant years of the
Union of Militant Atheists he was employed at its headquarters; then he
graduated from the Institute of Red Professors and worked in the press
department of the Central Committee of the VKPb. In 1941, he was captured by
the Germans and survived the entire war in captivity a Jew and a high-level
commissar at that! And despite categorical evidence of his culpability from
SMERSHs [Translators note: a frontline counter-intelligence organization,
literally, Death to Spies] point of view, how could he possibly surviveif he
was not a traitor? Others were imprisoned for a long time for lesser
crimes.Yet nothing happened, and in 1946 he was already safely employed in
the Museum of the History of Religion and then in the Institute of History at the
Academy of Science.2650)
Yet such anecdotal evidence cannot make up a convincing argument for
either side and there are no reliable and specific statistics nor are they likely to
surface in the future.
Recently, an Israeli periodical has published some interesting testimony.
When a certain Jonas Degen decided to volunteer for a Komsomol platoon at
the beginning of the war, another Jewish youth, Shulim Dain, whom Jonas
invited to come and join him, replied that it would be really fortunate if the
Jews could just watch the battle from afar since this is not their war, though
namely this war may inspire Jews and help them to rebuild Israel. When I am
conscripted to the army, Ill go to war. But to volunteer? Not a chance. 2651 And
Dain was not the only one who thought like this; in particular, older and more
experienced Jews may have had similar thoughts. And this attitude, especially
among the Jews devoted to the eternal idea of Israel, is fully understandable.
And yet it is baffling, because the advancing enemy was the arch enemy of the
Jews, seeking above all else to annihilate them. How could Dain and like-
minded individuals remain neutral? Did they think that the Russians had no
other choice but to fight for their land anyway?
One modern commentator (I know him personally he is a veteran and a
former camp inmate) concludes: Even among the older veterans these days I
have not come across people with such clarity of thought and depth of
understanding as Shulim Dain (who perished at Stalingrad) possessed: two
fascist monsters interlocked in deadly embrace. Why should we participate in
that?2652
Of course, Stalins regime was not any better than Hitlers. But for the
wartime Jews, these two monsters could not be equal! If that other monster
2649, . 5, . 83; . . 1, . 405-430.
2650, . 3, . 383.
2651. . * // 22. 1990- 1991, 74, . 252. (
: . . . -: , 1986.)
2652 , . 252.
won, what could then have happened to the Soviet Jews? Wasnt this war the
personal Jewish war? wasnt it their own Patriotic War to cross arms with the
deadliest enemy in the entire Jewish history? And those Jews who perceived the
war as their own and who did not separate their fate from that of Russians, those
like Freylikh, Lazarev and Fainerman, whose thinking was opposite to Shulim
Dains, they fought selflessly.
God forbid, I do not explain the Dains position as Jewish cowardice.
Yes, the Jews demonstrated survivalist prudence and caution throughout the
entire history of the Diaspora, yet it is this history that explains these qualities.
And during the Six-Day War and other Israeli wars, the Jews have proven their
outstanding military courage.
Taking all that into consideration, Dains position can only be explained by
a relaxed feeling of dual citizenship the very same that back in 1922,
Professor Solomon Lurie from Petrograd considered as one of the main sources
of anti-Semitism (and its explanation) a Jew living in a particular country
belongs not only to that country, and his loyalties become inevitably split in
two. The Jews have always harbored nationalist attitudes, but the object of
their nationalism was Jewry, not the country in which they lived. 2653 Their
interest in this country is partial. After all, they even if many of them only
unconsciously saw ahead looming in the future their very own nation of Israel.

And what about the rear? Researchers are certain about the growth of anti-
Semitism during the war.2654 The curve of anti-Semitism in those years
rose sharply again, and anti-Semitic manifestations by their intensity and
prevalence dwarfed the anti-Semitism of the second half of the 1920s. 2655
During the war, anti-Semitism become commonplace in the domestic life in
the Soviet deep hinterland.2656
During evacuation, so-called domestic anti-Semitism, which had been
dormant since the establishment of the Stalinist dictatorship in the early 1930s,
was revived against the background of general insecurity and breakdown and
other hardships and deprivations, engendered by the war.2657 This statement
refers mainly to Central Asia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, especially when
the masses of wounded and disabled veterans rushed there from the front,2658
and exactly there the masses of the evacuated Jews lived, including Polish Jews,
who were torn from their traditional environment by deportation and who had
no experience of Soviet kolkhozes. Here are the testimonies of Jewish evacuees
2653.. . . -: , 1976, . 77 [1- .
.: , 1922].
2654. . // -2, . 297.
2655.. . , . 197.
2656. . , . 6.
2657.. . , . 242.
2658. . , . 157.
to Central Asia recorded soon after the war: The low labor productivity among
evacuated Jews served in the eyes of the locals as a proof of allegedly
characteristic Jewish reluctance to engage in physical labor.2659 The
intensification of [anti-Semitic] attitudes was fueled by the Polish refugees
activity on the commodity markets.2660 Soon they realized that their regular
incomes from the employment in industrial enterprises, kolkhozes, and
cooperatives would not save them from starvation and death. To survive,
there was only one way trading on the market or `speculation; therefore, it
was the Soviet reality that drove Polish Jews to resort to market transactions
whether they liked it or not.2661 The non-Jewish population of Tashkent was
ill-disposed toward the Jewish evacuees from Ukraine. Some said, `Look at
these Jews. They always have a lot of money. 2662 Then there were incidents of
harassment and insults of Jews, threats against them, throwing them out of
bread queues.2663 Another group of Russian Jews, mostly bureaucrats with a
considerable amount of cash, inspired the hostility of the locals for inflating the
already high market prices.2664
The author proceeds confidently to explain these facts thus: Hitlers
propaganda reaches even here,2665 and he is not alone in reaching such
conclusions.
What a staggering revelation! How could Hitlers propaganda victoriously
reach and permeate all of Central Asia when it was barely noticeable at the front
with all those rare and dangerous-to-touch leaflets thrown from airplanes, and
when all private radio receiver sets were confiscated throughout the USSR?
No, the author realizes that there was yet another reason for the growth of
anti-Semitic attitudes in the districts that absorbed evacuees en masse. There,
the antagonism between the general mass of the provincial population and the
privileged bureaucrats from the countrys central cities manifested itself in a
subtle form. Evacuation of organizations from those centers into the hinterland
provided the local population with an opportunity to fully appreciate the depth
of social contrast.2666

2659Dr. Jerzy Gliksman. Jewish Exiles in Soviet Russia (1939-1943). Part 2, July 1947, p. 6 //
-. . : . .
, . 157.
2660.. . , . 191.
2661Rachel Erlich. Summary Report on Eighteen Intensive Interviews with Jewish DPs from
Poland and the Soviet Union. October 1948, p. 9f //
- . : . . , . 192.
2662 , . 26. . : .. . , . 194.
2663Dr. Jerzy Gliksman. Jewish Exiles, p. 17. . : ..
, . 159.
2664 , . 15. . : .. , . 159.
2665. . , . 157.
2666 , . 158.
Then there were those populations that experienced the German invasion and
occupation, for instance, the Ukrainians. Here is testimony published in March
1945 in the bulletin of the Jewish Agency for Palestine: The Ukrainians meet
returning Jews with hostility. In Kharkov, a few weeks after the liberation, Jews
do not dare to walk alone on the streets at night. There have been many cases
of beating up Jews on the local markets. Upon returning to their homes, Jews
often found only a portion of their property, but when they complained in
courts, Ukrainians often perjured themselves against them.2667 (The same thing
happened everywhere; besides it was useless to complain in court anyway:
many of the returning non-Jewish evacuees found their old places looted as
well.) There are many testimonies about hostile attitudes towards Jews in
Ukraine after its liberation from the Germans. 2668 As a result of the German
occupation, anti-Semitism in all its forms has significantly increased in all
social strata of Ukraine, Moldova and Lithuania.2669
Indeed, here, in these territories, Hitlers anti-Jewish propaganda did work
well during the years of occupation, and yet the main point was the same: that
under the Soviet regime the Jews had merged with the ruling class and so a
secret German report from the occupied territories in October 1941 states that
the animosity of the Ukrainian population against Jews is enormous. they
view the Jews as informants and agents of the NKVD, which organized the
terror against the Ukrainian people.2670
Generally speaking, early in the war, the Germans plan was to create an
impression that it was not Germans but the local population that began
extermination of the Jews; S. Schwartz believes that, unlike the reports of the
German propaganda press, the German reports not intended for publication are
reliable.2671 He profusely quotes a report by SS Standartenfhrer F. Shtoleker to
Berlin on the activities of the SS units under his command (operating in the
Baltic states, Byelorussia and in some parts of the RSFSR) for the period
between the beginning of the war in the East and October 15, 1941: Despite
facing considerable difficulties, we were able to direct local anti-Semitic forces
toward organization of anti-Jewish pogroms within several hours after arrival
[of German troops]. It was necessary to show that it was a natural reaction
to the years of oppression by Jews and communist terror. It was equally
important to establish for the future as an undisputed and provable fact that
the local people have resorted to the most severe measures against Bolsheviks

2667Bulletin of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. March 1945, p. 2-3.
. : .. , . 160.
2668. . , . 184.
2669. . // -2, . 359.
2670Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg. 14
November 1945-1 October 1946. Nuremberg, 1949, Vol. 38, p. 292-293, Doc. 102-R.
. : .. , . 101.
2671. . , . 88.
and Jews on their own initiative, without demonstrable evidence for any
guidance from the German authorities.2672
The willingness of the local population for such initiatives varied greatly in
different occupied regions. In the tense atmosphere of the Baltics, the hatred of
Jews reached a boiling point at the very moment of Hitlers onslaught against
Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941.2673 The Jews were accused of collaboration
with the NKVD in the deportation of Baltic citizens. The Israeli Encyclopedia
quotes an entry from the diary of Lithuanian physician E. Budvidayte-
Kutorgene: All Lithuanians, with few exceptions, are unanimous in their
hatred of Jews.2674 Yet, the Standartenfhrer reports that to our surprise, it was
not an easy task to induce a pogrom there. This was achieved with the help
of Lithuanian partisans, who exterminated 1,500 Jews in Kaunas during the
night of June 26 and 2,300 more in the next few days; they also burned the
Jewish quarter and several synagogues.2675 Mass executions of the Jews were
conducted by the SS and the Lithuanian police on October 29 and November
25, 1941. About 19,000 of the 36,000 Jews of Kaunas were shot in the Ninth
Fort.2676 In many Lithuanian cities and towns, all of the Jewish population was
exterminated by local Lithuanian police under German control in the autumn of
1941.2677 It was much harder to induce the same self-cleaning operations and
pogroms in Latvia, reports the Standartenfhrer, because there the entire
national leadership, especially in Riga, was destroyed or deported by the
Bolsheviks.2678 Still, on July 4, 1941, Latvian activists in Riga set fire to
several synagogues into which the Jews had been herded. About 2,000 died;
in the first days of occupation, locals assisted in executions by the Germans of
several thousand Jews in the Bikernieki forest near Riga, and in late October
and in early November in the shootings of about 27,000 Jews at a nearby
railway station Rumbula.2679 In Estonia, with a small number of Jews in the
country, it was not possible to induce pogroms, reports the officer.2680 (Estonian
Jews were destroyed without pogroms: In Estonia, about 2,000 Jews remained.
Almost all male Jews were executed in the first weeks of the occupation by the
Germans and their Estonian collaborators. The rest were interned in the

2672Trial of the Major War Criminals Vol. 37, p. 672-683, Doc. 180-L. . : .
. , . 89.
2673. . // -2, . 97.
2674, . 8, . 218.
2675Trial of the Major War Criminals Vol. 37, . 672-683, Doc. 180-L. . : ..
, . 89-90.
2676, . 8, . 218.
2677, . 8, . 218.
2678Trial of the Major War Criminals Vol. 37, p. 672-683, Doc. 180-L. . : .
. , . 90.
2679, . 8, . 218.
2680Trial of the Major War Criminals Vol.37, p. 672-683, Doc. 180-L. . : .
. , . 89-90.
concentration camp Harku near Tallinn, and by the end of 1941 all of them
were killed.2681
But the German leadership was disappointed in Byelorussia. S. Schwartz:
the failure of the Germans to draw sympathy from the broad masses of locals
to the cause of extermination of Jews is completely clear from secret German
documents The population invariably and consistently refrains from any
independent action against the Jews.2682 Still, according to eyewitnesses in
Gorodok in the Vitebsk oblast, when the ghetto was liquidated on Oct. 14, 1941,
the Polizei were worse than the Germans;2683 and in Borisov, the Russian
police (it follows in the report that they were actually imported from Berlin)
destroyed within two days [October 20 and 21, 1941] 6,500 Jews. Importantly,
the author of the report notes that the killings of Jews were not met with
sympathy from the local population: `Who ordered that How is it possible?
Now they kill the Jews, and when will be our turn? What have these poor Jews
done? They were just workers. The really guilty ones are, of course, long gone.
2684 And here is a report by a German trustee, a native Byelorussian from
Latvia: In Byelorussia, there is no Jewish question. For them, its a purely
German business, not Byelorussian Everybody sympathizes with and pities
the Jews, and they look at Germans as barbarians and murderers of the Jews
[Judenhenker]: a Jew, they say, is a human being just like a Byelorussian. 2685 In
any case, S. Schwartz writes that there were no national Byelorussian squads
affiliated with the German punitive units, though there were Latvian,
Lithuanian, and `mixed squads; the latter enlisted some Byelorussians as
well.2686
The project was more successful in Ukraine. From the beginning of the
war, Hitlers propaganda incited the Ukrainian nationalists (Bandera?s
Fighters) to take revenge on the Jews for the murder of Petliura by
Schwartzbard.2687 The organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of Bandera-Melnik
(OUN) did not need to be persuaded: even before the Soviet-German War, in
April 1941, it adopted a resolution at its Second Congress in Krakow, in which
paragraph 17 states: The Yids in the Soviet Union are the most loyal supporters
of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Moscow imperialism in
Ukraine The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists considers the Yids as the
pillar of the Moscow-Bolshevik regime, while educating the masses that
Moscow is the main enemy.2688 Initially, the Bandera Fighters allied with the
2681 (1941-1944): .
/ . . . : -, 1991, . 12.
2682Trial of the Major War Criminals Vol. 37, p. 672-683, Doc. 180-L. . : .
. , . 91-92.
2683, . 8, . 218.
2684.. . *, . 134-135.
2685 *, . 132.
2686 *, . 93.
2687. . - // -2, . 235-236.
2688. .
* // -, 1995,
Germans against the Bolsheviks. During the whole of 1940 and the first half of
1941, the OUN leadership was preparing for a possible war between Germany
and the USSR. Then the main base of the OUN was the Generalgouvernement,
i. e., the Nazi-occupied Poland. Ukrainian militias were being created there,
and lists of suspicious persons, with Jews among them, were compiled. Later
these lists were used by Ukrainian nationalists to exterminate Jews. `Mobile
units for the East Ukraine were created and battalions of Ukrainian
Nationalists, `Roland and `Nakhtigal, were formed in the German Army. The
OUN arrived in the East [of Ukraine] together with the frontline German troops.
During the summer of 1941 a wave of Jewish pogroms rolled over Western
Ukraine. with participation of both Melnyks and of Banderas troops. As a
result of these pogroms, around 28,000 Jews were killed.2689 Among OUN
documents, there is a declaration by J. Stetzko (who in July 1941 was named
the head of the Ukrainian government): The Jews help Moscow to keep
Ukraine in slavery, and therefore, I support extermination of the Yids and the
need to adopt in Ukraine the German methods of extermination of Jewry. In
July, a meeting of Banderas OUN leaders was held in Lvov, where, among
other topics, policies toward Jews were discussed. There were various
proposals: to build the policy on the principles of Nazi policy before 1939.
There were proposals to isolate Jews in ghettoes. But the most radical
proposal was made by Stepan Lenkavskiy, who stated: `Concerning the Jews we
will adopt all the measures that will lead to their eradication. 2690 And until the
relations between the OUN and the Germans deteriorated (because Germany did
not recognize the self-proclaimed Ukrainian independence), there were many
cases, especially in the first year when Ukrainians directly assisted the
Germans in the extermination of Jews. Ukrainian auxiliary police, recruited
by the Germans mainly in Galicia and Volhynia,2691 played a special role. In
Uman in September 1941, Ukrainian city police under command of several
officers and sergeants of the SS shot nearly 6,000 Jews; and in early November
6 km outside Rovno, the SS and Ukrainian police slaughtered 21,000 Jews
from the ghetto.2692 However, S. Schwartz writes: It is impossible to figure out
which part of the Ukrainian population shared an active anti-Semitism with a
predisposition toward pogroms. Probably quite a large part, particularly the
more cultured strata, did not share these sentiments. As for the original part of
the Soviet Ukraine [within the pre-September 1939 Soviet borders], no
evidence for the `spontaneous pogroms by Ukrainians could be found in the

2(9), . 106.
2689. .
* // -, 1995,
2(9), . 105-106, 107.
2690 , . 106-107.
2691. . , . 98, 101.
2692, . 8, . 218.
secret German reports from those areas.2693 In addition, Tatar militia squads in
the Crimea were exterminating Jews also.2694
Regarding indigenous Russian regions occupied by the Germans, the
Germans could not exploit anti-Russian sentiments and the argument about
Moscows imperialism was unsustainable; and the argument for any Judeo-
Bolshevism, devoid of support in local nationalism, largely lost its appeal;
among the local Russian population only relatively few people actively
supported the Germans in their anti-Jewish policies of extermination.2695
A researcher on the fate of Soviet Jewry concludes: the Germans in
Lithuania and Latvia had a tendency to mask their pogromist activities,
bringing to the fore extermination squads made up of pogromists emerging
under German patronage from the local population; but in Byelorussia, and to
a considerable extent even in Ukraine and especially in the occupied areas of
the RSFSR, the Germans did not succeed as the local population had mostly
disappointed the hopes pinned on it and there the Nazi exterminators had to
proceed openly.2696

Hitlers plan for the military campaign against the Soviet Union (Operation
Barbarossa) included special tasks to prepare the ground for political rule, with
the character of these tasks stemming from the all-out struggle between the two
opposing political systems. In May and June 1941, the Supreme Command of
the Wehrmacht issued more specific directives, ordering execution without trial
of persons suspected of hostile action against Germany (and of political
commissars, partisans, saboteurs and Jews in any case) in the theater of
Barbarossa.2697
To carry out special tasks in the territory of the USSR, four special groups
(Einsatzgruppen) were established within the Security Service (SS) and the
Secret Police (Gestapo), that had operational units (Einsatzkommando)
numerically equal to companies. The Einsatzgruppen advanced along with the
front units of the German Army, but reported directly to the Chief of Security of
the Third Reich, Reinhard Heydrich.
Einsatzgruppe A (about 1000 soldiers and SS officers under the command
of SS Standartenfhrer Dr. F. Shtoleker) of Army Group North operated in
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Leningrad and Pskov oblasts. Group B (655
men, under the command of Brigadenfhrer A. Neveu) was attached to Army
Group Centre, which was advancing through Byelorussia and the Smolensk
Oblast toward Moscow. Group C (600, Standartenfhrer E. Rush) was attached
2693. . , . 99.
2694.. . //
-2, . 74.
2695. . , . 102.
2696 , . 74, 90.
2697 *, . 4.
to Army Group South and operated in the Western and Eastern Ukraine.
Group D (600 men under the command of SS Standartenfhrer Prof. O.
Ohlendorf) was attached to the 11th Army and operated in Southern Ukraine,
the Crimea, and in the Krasnodar and Stavropol regions.
Extermination of Jews and commissars (carriers of the Judeo-Bolshevik
ideology) by the Germans began from the first days of the June 1941invasion,
though they did so somewhat chaotically and with an extremely broad
scope.2698 In other German-occupied countries, elimination of the Jewish
population proceeded gradually and thoroughly. It usually started with legal
restrictions, continued with the creation of ghettos and introduction of forced
labor and culminated in deportation and mass extermination. In Soviet Russia,
all these elements were strangely intermingled in time and place. In each region,
sometimes even within one city, various methods of harassment were used
there was no uniform or standardized system.2699 Shooting of Jewish prisoners
of war could happen sometimes right upon capture and sometimes later in the
concentration camps; civilian Jews were sometimes first confined in ghettoes,
sometimes in forced-labor camps, and in other places they were shot outright on
the spot, and still in other places the gas vans were used. As a rule, the place
of execution was an anti-tank ditch, or just a pit.2700
The numbers of those exterminated in the cities of the Western USSR by
the winter of 1941 (the first period of extermination) are striking: according to
the documents, in Vilnius out of 57,000 Jews who had lived there about 40,000
were killed; in Riga out of 33,000 27,000; in Minsk out of the 100,000-strong
ghetto 24,000 were killed (there the extermination continued until the end of
occupation); in Rovno out of 27,000 Jews 21,000 were killed; in Mogilev
about 10,000 Jews were shot; in Vitebsk up to 20,000; and near Kiselevich
village nearly 20,000 Jews from Bobruisk were killed; in Berdichev
15,000.2701
By late September, the Nazis staged a mass extermination of Jews in Kiev.
On September 26 they distributed announcements around the city requiring all
Jews, under the penalty of death, to report to various assembly points. And
Jews, having no other option but to submit, gathered obediently, if not
trustingly, altogether about 34,000; and on September 29 and 30, they were
methodically shot at Babi Yar, putting layer upon layers of corpses in a large
ravine.Hence there was no need to dig any graves a giant hecatomb!
According to the official German announcement, not questioned later, 33,771
Jews were shot over the course of two days. During the next two years of the

2698. . , . 65.
2699. . - // -2, . 229.
2700*, . 8, . 218.
2701 . ,
, . . ..
(1968); .
(1991); , .
8 (1996).
Kiev occupation, the Germans continued shootings in their favorite and so
convenient ravine. It is believed that the number of the executed not only Jews
had reached, perhaps, 100,000.2702
The executions at Babi Yar have become a symbol in world history. People
shrug at the cold-blooded calculation, the business-like organization, so typical
for the 20th century that crowns humanistic civilization: during the savage
Middle Ages people killed each other en masse only in a fit of rage or in the
heat of battle.
It should be recalled that within a few kilometers from Babi Yar, in the
enormous Darnitskiy camp, tens of thousands Soviet prisoners of war, soldiers
and officers, died during the same months: yet we do not commemorate it
properly, and many are not even aware of it. The same is true about the more
than two million Soviet prisoners of war who perished during the first years of
the war.
The Catastrophe persistently raked its victims from all the occupied Soviet
territories.
In Odessa on October 17, 1941, on the second day of occupation by
German and Romanian troops, several thousand Jewish males were killed, and
later, after the bombing of the Romanian Military Office, the total terror was
unleashed: about 5,000 people, most of them Jews and thousands of others,
were herded into a suburban village and executed there. In November, there was
a mass deportation of people into the Domanevskiy District, where about
55,000 Jews were shot in December and January of 1942. 2703 In the first
months of occupation, by the end of 1941, 22,464 Jews were killed in Kherson
and Nikolayev; 11,000 in Dnepropetrovsk; 8,000 in Mariupol and almost as
many in Kremenchug; about 15,000 in Kharkovs Drobytsky Yar; and more
than 20,000 in Simferopol and Western Crimea.2704
By the end of 1941, the German High Command had realized that the
blitz had failed and that a long war loomed ahead. The needs of the war
economy demanded a different organization of the home front. In some places,
the German administration slowed down the extermination of Jews in order to
exploit their manpower and skills. As the result, ghettoes survived in large
cities like Riga, Vilnius, Kaunas, Baranovichi, Minsk, and in other, smaller
ones, where many Jews worked for the needs of the German war economy. 2705
Yet the demand for labor that prolonged the existence of these large ghettoes did
not prevent resumption of mass killings in other places in the spring of 1942: in
Western Byelorussia, Western Ukraine, Southern Russia and the Crimea, 30,000
Jews were deported from the Grodno region to Treblinka and Auschwitz; Jews
of Polesia, Pinsk, Brest-Litovsk, and Smolensk were eradicated. During the
1942 summer offensive, the Germans killed local Jews immediately upon

2702, . 1, . 275.
2703, . 6, . 125-126.
2704 , . 16.
2705 , . 17.
arrival: the Jews of Kislovodsk, Pyatigorsk and Essentuki were killed in
antitank ditches near Mineralniye Vody; thus died evacuees to Essentuki from
Leningrad and Kishinev. Jews of Kerch and Stavropol were exterminated as
well. In Rostov-on-Don, recaptured by the Germans in late July 1942, all the
remaining Jewish population was eradicated by August 11.
In 1943, after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the outcome of the war
became clear. During their retreat, the Germans decided to exterminate all
remaining Jews. On June 21, 1943 Himmler ordered the liquidation of the
remaining ghettoes. In June 1943, the ghettoes of Lvov, Ternopol, and
Drohobych were liquidated. After the liberation of Eastern Galicia in 1944,
only 10,000 to 12,000 Jews were still alive, which constituted about 2% of all
Jews who had remained under occupation. Able-bodied Jews from ghettoes in
Minsk, Lida, and Vilnius were transferred to concentration camps in Poland,
Estonia, and Latvia, while the rest were shot. Later, during the summer, 1944
retreat from the Baltics, some of the Jews in those camps were shot, and some
were moved into camps in Germany (Stutthof et al.).2706
Destined for extermination, Jews fought for survival: underground groups
sprang up in many ghettoes to organize escapes. Yet after a successful breakout,
a lot depended on the local residents that they not betray the Jews, provide
them with non-Jewish papers, shelter and food. In the occupied areas, Germans
sentenced those helping Jews to death.2707 But everywhere, in all occupied
territories, there were people who helped the Jews. Yet there were few of
them. They risked their lives and the lives of their families. There were
hundreds, maybe thousands of such people. But the majority of local
populations just watched from a distance.2708 In Byelorussia and the occupied
territories of the RSFSR, where local populations were not hostile to the
remaining Jews and where no pogroms ever occurred, the local population
provided still less assistance to Jews than in Europe or even in Poland, the
country of widespread, traditional, folk anti-Semitism. 2709 (Summaries of
many similar testimonies can be found in books by S. Schwartz and I. Arad.)
They plausibly attribute this not only to the fear of execution but also to the
habit of obedience to authorities (developed over the years of Soviet rule) and to
not meddling in the affairs of others.
Yes, we have been so downtrodden, so many millions have been torn away
from our midst in previous decades, that any attempt at resistance to
government power was foredoomed, so now Jews as well could not get the
support of the population.
But even well-organized Soviet underground and guerrillas directed from
Moscow did little to save the doomed Jews. Relations with the Soviet guerrillas
were a specially acute problem for the Jews in the occupied territories. Going

2706 , . 26-27.
2707, . 8, . 222.
2708 , . 24.
2709. . , . 108.
into the woods, i.e., joining up with a partisan unit, was a better lot for Jewish
men than waiting to be exterminated by the Germans. Yet hostility to the Jews
was widespread and often acute among partisans, and there were some Russian
detachments that did not accept Jews on principle. They alleged that Jews
cannot and do not want to fight, writes a former Jewish partisan Moshe
Kaganovich. A non-Jewish guerilla recruit was supplied with weapons, but a
Jew was required to provide his own, and sometimes it was traded down.
There is pervasive enmity to Jews among partisans. in some detachments
anti-Semitism was so strong that the Jews felt compelled to flee from such
units.2710
For instance, in 1942 some two hundred Jewish boys and girls fled into the
woods from the ghetto in the shtetl of Mir in Grodno oblast, and there they
encountered anti-Semitism among Soviet guerrillas, which led to the death of
many who fled; only some of them were able to join guerrilla squads. 2711 Or
another case: A guerrilla squad under the command of Ganzenko operated near
Minsk. It was replenished mainly with fugitives from the Minsk ghetto, but
the growing number of Jews in the unit triggered anti-Semitic clashes and
then the Jewish part of the detachment broke away.2712 Such actions on the part
of the guerrillas were apparently spontaneous, not directed from the center.
According to Moshe Kaganovich, from the end of 1943 the influence of more-
disciplined personnel arriving from the Soviet Union had increased and the
general situation for [the Jews had] somewhat improved.2713 However, he
complains that when a territory was liberated by the advancing regular Soviet
troops and the partisans were sent to the front (which is true, and everybody was
sent indiscriminately), it was primarily Jews who were sent 2714 and that is
incredible.
However, Kaganovich writes that Jews were sometimes directly assisted by
the partisans. There were even partisan attacks on small towns in order to save
Jews from ghettoes and [concentration] camps, and that Russian partisan
movement helped fleeing Jews to cross the front lines. [And in this way
they] smuggled across the frontline many thousands of Jews who were hiding in
the forests of Western Byelorussia escaping the carnage. A partisan force in the
Chernigov region accepted more than five hundred children from Jewish
family camps in the woods, protected them and took care of them After the
Red Army liberated Sarny (on Volyn), several squads broke the front and sent
Jewish children to Moscow. (S. Schwartz believes that these reports are
greatly exaggerated. [But] they are based on real facts, [and they] merit
attention.2715)

2710 *, . 121-124.
2711, . 5, . 366.
2712, . 1, . 499.
2713. . *, . 127.
2714 *, . 129.
2715. . *, . 125-126.
 Jewish family camps originated among the Jewish masses fleeing into the
woods and there were many thousands of such fugitives. Purely Jewish armed
squads were formed specifically for the protection of these camps. (Weapons
were purchased through third parties from German soldiers or policemen.) Yet
how to feed them all? The only way was to take food as well as shoes and
clothing, both male and female, by force from the peasants of surrounding
villages. The peasant was placed between the hammer and the anvil. If he did
not carry out his assigned production minimum, the Germans burned his
household and killed him as a `partisan. On the other hand, guerrillas took from
him by force all they needed2716 and this naturally caused spite among the
peasants: they are robbed by Germans and robbed by guerrillas and now in
addition even the Jews rob them? And the Jews even take away clothes from
their women?
In the spring of 1943, partisan Baruch Levin came to one such family
camp, hoping to get medicines for his sick comrades. He remembers: Tuvia
Belsky seemed like a legendary hero to me. Coming from the people, he
managed to organize a 1,200-strong unit in the woods. In the worst days
when a Jew could not even feed himself, he cared for the sick, elderly and for
the babies born in the woods. Levin told Tuvia about Jewish partisans: We,
the few survivors, no longer value life. Now the only meaning of our lives is
revenge. It is our duty to fight the Germans, wipe out all of them to the last
one. I talked for a long time; offered to teach Belskys people how to work
with explosives, and all other things I have myself learned. But my words, of
course, could not change Tuvias mindset `Baruch, I would like you to
understand one thing. It is precisely because there are so few of us left, it is so
important for me that the Jews survive. And I see this as my purpose; it is the
most important thing for me.2717
And the very same Moshe Kaganovich, as late as in 1956, wrotein a book
published in Buenos Aires, in peacetime, years after the devastating defeat of
Nazism shows, according to S. Schwartz, a really bloodthirsty attitude
toward the Germans, an attitude that seems to be influenced by the Hitler
plague. he glorifies putting German prisoners to `Jewish death by Jewish
partisans according to the horrible Nazi examples or excitedly recalls the
speech by a commander of a [Jewish] guerrilla unit given before the villagers of
a Lithuanian village who were gathered and forced to kneel by partisans in the
square after a punitive raid against that village whose population had actively
assisted the Germans in the extermination of Jews (several dozen villagers were
executed during that raid).2718 S. Schwartz writes about this with a restrained
but clear condemnation.
Yes, a lot of things happened. Predatory killings call for revenge, but each
act of revenge, tragically, plants the seeds of new retribution in the future.

2716 *, . 121, 128.

2717 , . 386-387.
2718. . *, . 132.
The different Jewish sources variously estimate the total losses among Soviet
Jews during the Second World War (within the post-war borders). How many
Soviet Jews survived the war?, asks S. Schwartz and offers this calculation:
1,810,000-1,910,000 (excluding former refugees from the Western Poland and
Romania, now repatriated ). The calculations imply that the number of Jews by
the end of the war was markedly lower than two million and much lower than
the almost universally accepted number of three million.2719 So, the total
number of losses according to Schwarz was 2,800,000-2,900,000.
In 1990 I. Arad provided his estimate: During the liberation of German-
occupied territories the Soviet Army met almost no Jews. Out of the
2,750,000-2,900,000 Jews who remained under the Nazi rule [in 1941] in the
occupied Soviet territories, almost all died. To this figure Arad suggests adding
about 120,000 Jews Soviet Army soldiers who died on the front, and about
80,000 shot in the POW camps, and tens of thousands of Jews [who died]
during the siege of Leningrad, Odessa and other cities, and in the deep rear
because of harsh living conditions in the evacuation.2720
Demographer M. Kupovetskiy published several studies in the 1990s,
where he used newly available archival materials, made some corrections to
older data and employed an improved technique for ethnodemographic analysis.
His result was that the general losses of Jewish population within the postwar
USSR borders in 1941-1945 amounted to 2,733,000 (1,112,000 Eastern and
1,621,000 Western Jews), or 55% of 4,965,000 the total number of Jews in the
USSR in June 1941. This figure, apart from the victims of Nazi extermination,
includes the losses among the military and the guerrillas, among civilians near
the front line, during evacuation and deportation, as well as the victims of
Stalins camps during the war. (However, the author notes, that quantitative
evaluation of each of these categories within the overall casualty figure is yet to
be done.2721) Apparently, the Short Jewish Encyclopedia agrees with this
assessment as it provides the same number.2722
The currently accepted figure for the total losses of the Soviet population
during the Great Patriotic War is 27,000,000 (if the method of demographic
balance is used, it is 26,600,0002723) and this may still be underestimated.
We must not overlook what that war was for the Russians. The war rescued
not only their country, not only Soviet Jewry, but also the entire social system of
the Western world from Hitler. This war exacted such sacrifice from the Russian
people that its strength and health have never since fully recovered. That war
overstrained the Russian people. It was yet another disaster on top of those of

2719 , . 171-173.
2720. . , . 91.
2721. . // -
, 1995, 2(9), . 134-155.
2722, . 8, . 299.
2723.. , .. , .. . , 1922-1991.
., 1993, . 78.
the Civil War and de-kulakization and from which the Russian people have
almost run dry.

The ruthless and unrelenting Catastrophe, which was gradually devouring

Soviet Jewry in a multitude of exterminating events all over the occupied lands,
was part of a greater Catastrophe designed to eradicate the entire European
Jewry.
As we examine only the events in Russia, the Catastrophe as a whole is not
covered in this book. Yet the countless miseries having befallen on both our
peoples, the Jewish and the Russian, in the 20th century, and the unbearable
weight of the lessons of history and gnawing anxiety about the future, make it
impossible not to share, if only briefly, some reflections about it, reflections of
mine and others, and impossible not to examine how the high Jewish minds
look at the Catastrophe from the historical perspective and how they attempt to
encompass and comprehend it.
It is for a reason that the Catastrophe is always written with a capital
letter. It was an epic event for such an ancient and historical people. It could not
fail to arouse the strongest feelings and a wide variety of reflections and
conclusions among the Jews.
In many Jews, long ago assimilated and distanced from their own people,
the Catastrophe reignited a more distinct and intense sense of their Jewishness.
Yet for many, the Catastrophe became a proof that God is dead. If He had
existed, He certainly would never have allowed Auschwitz. 2724 Then there is an
opposite reflection: Recently, a former Auschwitz inmate said: In the camps,
we were given a new Torah, though we have not been able to read it yet.2725
An Israeli author states with conviction: The Catastrophe happened
because we did not follow the Covenant and did not return to our land. We had
to return to our land to rebuild the Temple.2726
Still, such an understanding is achieved only by a very few, although it does
permeate the entire Old Testament.
Some have developed and still harbor a bitter feeling: Once, humanity
turned away from us. We werent a part of the West at the time of the
Catastrophe. The West rejected us, cast us away.2727 We are as upset by the
nearly absolute indifference of the world and even of non-European Jewry to the
plight of the Jews in the fascist countries as by the Catastrophe in Europe itself.
What a great guilt lies on the democracies of the world in general and
especially on the Jews in the democratic countries! The pogrom in Kishinev
was an insignificant crime compared to the German atrocities, to the

2724, . 4, . 175.
2725. . // 22, 1988, 58, . 144.
2726. . // , . 191.
2727. . // , . 141 -142.
methodically implemented plan of extermination of millions of Jewish lives;
and yet Kishinev pogrom triggered a bigger protest Even the Beilis Trial in
Kiev attracted more worldwide attention.2728
But this is unfair. After the world realized the essence and the scale of the
destruction, the Jews experienced consistent and energetic support and
passionate compassion from many nations.
Some contemporary Israelis recognize this and even warn their compatriots
against any such excesses: Gradually, the memory of the Catastrophe ceased to
be just a memory. It has become the ideology of the Jewish state. The
memory of the Catastrophe turned into a religious devotion, into the state cult.
The State of Israel has assumed the role of an apostle of the cult of the
Catastrophe, the role of a priest who collects routine tithes from other nations.
And woe to those who refuse to pay that tithe! And in conclusion: The worst
legacy of Nazism for Jews is the Jew?s role of a super-victim.2729
Here is a similar excerpt from yet another author: the cult of the
Catastrophe has filled a void in the souls of secular Jews, from being a
reaction to an event of the past, the trauma of the Catastrophe has evolved into a
new national symbol, replacing all other symbols. And this `mentality of the
Catastrophe is growing with each passing year; if we do not recover from the
trauma of Auschwitz, we will never become a normal nation.2730
Among the Jews, the sometimes painful work of re-examining the
Catastrophe never ceases. Here is the opinion of an Israeli historian, a former
inmate of a Soviet camp: I do not belong to those Jews who are inclined to
blame the evil `goyim for our national misfortunes while casting ourselves as
poor lambs or toys in the hands of others. Anyway not in the 20th century!
On the contrary, I fully agree with Hannah Arendt that the Jews of our century
were equal participants in the historical games of the nations and the monstrous
Catastrophe that befell them was the result of not only evil plots of the enemies
of mankind, but also of the huge fatal miscalculations on the part of the Jewish
people themselves, their leaders and activists.2731
Indeed, Hannah Arendt was searching for the causes of the Catastrophe
[also] in Jewry itself. Her main argument is that modern anti-Semitism was
one of the consequences of the particular attitudes of the Jews towards the state
and society in Europe; the Jews turned out to be unable to evaluate power
shifts in a nation state and growing social contradictions.2732
In the late 1970s, we read in Dan Levins book: On this issue, I agree with
Prof. Branover who believes that the Catastrophe was largely a punishment for

2728. . // -2, . 111.

2729-. // 22, 1988, 58, . 197-198, 200.
2730 . // 22, 1993, 85, . 132, 134, 139.
2731. . // 22, 1989, 64, . 218-219.
2732Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lgen: Ruland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert.
Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1992, pp. 137-138.
our sins, including the sin of leading the communist movement. There is
something in it.2733
Yet no such noticeable movement can be observed among world Jewry. To
a great many contemporary Jews such conclusions appear insulting and
blasphemous.
To the contrary: The very fact of the Catastrophe served as a moral
justification for Jewish chauvinism. Lessons of the Second World War have
been learned exactly contrariwise. The ideology of Jewish Nationalism has
grown and strengthened on this soil. This is terribly sad. A feeling of guilt and
compassion towards the nation-victim has become an indulgence, absolving the
sin unforgivable for all others. It is hence comes the moral permissibility of
public appeals not to mix ones own ancient blood with the alien blood.2734
In the late 1980s, a Jewish publicist from Germany wrote: Today, the
`moral capital of Auschwitz is already spent. 2735 One year later, she stated:
Solid moral capital gained by the Jews because of Auschwitz seems to be
depleted; the Jews can no longer proceed along the old way by raising
pretensions to the world. Today, the world already has the right to converse with
the Jews as it does with all others; the struggle for the rights of Jews is no
more progressive than a struggle for the rights of all other nations. It is high
time to break the mirror and look around we are not alone in this world.2736
It would have been equally great for Russian minds to elevate themselves
to similarly decent and benevolent self-criticism, especially in making
judgments about Russian history of the 20th century the brutality of the
Revolutionary period, the cowed indifference of the Soviet times and the
abominable plundering of the post-Soviet age. And to do it despite the
unbearable burden of realization that it was we Russians who ruined our history
through our useless rulers but also through our own worthlessness and
despite the gnawing anxiety that this may be irredeemable to perceive the
Russian experience as possibly a punishment from the Supreme Power.

2733 . : [] // 22, 1978, 1, . 55.

2734. . , // 22,
1992, 80, . 175.
2735. . : // , 1991, 3, . 142.
2736Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lgen, pp. 150-151.
 Chapter 22. From the end of the war to Stalins death

At the beginning of the 1920s the authors of a collection of articles titled Russia
and the Jews foresaw that all these bright perspectives (for the Jews in the
USSR) looked so bright only if one supposes that the Bolsheviks would want
to protect us. But would they? Can we assume that the people who in their
struggle for power betrayed everything, from the Motherland to Communism,
would remain faithful to us even when it stops benefiting them?2737
However, during so favorable a time to them as the 1920s and 1930s the
great majority of Soviet Jews chose to ignore this sober warning or simply did
not hear it.
Yet the Jews with their contribution to the Russian Revolution should have
expected that one day the inevitable recoil of revolution would hit even them, at
least during its ebb.
The postwar period became the years of deep disappointments2738 and
adversity for Soviet Jews. During Stalins last eight years, Soviet Jewry was
tested by persecutions of the cosmopolitans, the loss of positions in science,
arts and press, the crushing of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (EAK) with
the execution of its leadership and, finally, by the Doctors Plot.
By the nature of a totalitarian regime, only Stalin himself could initiate the
campaign aimed at weakening the Jewish presence and influence in the Soviet
system. Only he could make the first move.
Yet because of the rigidity of Soviet propaganda and Stalins craftiness, not
a single sound could be uttered nor a single step made in the open. We have
seen already that Soviet propaganda did not raise any alarm about the
annihilation of Jews in Germany during the war; indeed it covered up those
things, obviously being afraid of appearing pro-Jewish in the eyes of its own
citizens.
The disposition of the Soviet authorities towards Jews could evolve for
years without ever really surfacing at the level of official propaganda. The first
changes and shuffles in the bureaucracy began quite inconspicuously at the time
of growing rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler in 1939. By then Litvinov,

2737.. . // : . 1 /
. : YMCA-Press, 1978, . 80 [1- .
: , 1924].
2738. . (1939-1965).
-: . , 1966, . 198.
a Jewish Minister of Foreign Affairs, was replaced by Molotov (an ethnic
Russian) and a cleansing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NKID) was
underway. Simultaneously, Jews were barred from entrance into diplomatic
schools and military academies. Still, it took many more years before the
disappearance of Jews from the NKID and the sharp decline of their influence
in the Ministry of Foreign Trade became apparent.
Because of the intrinsic secrecy of all Soviet inner party moves, only very
few were aware of the presence of the subtle anti-Jewish undercurrents in the
Agitprop apparatus by the end of 1942 that aimed to push out Jews from the
major art centers such as the Bolshoi Theatre, the Moscow Conservatory, and
the Moscow Philarmonic, where, according to the note which Alexandrov, Head
of Agitprop, presented to the Central Committee in the summer of 1942,
everything was almost completely in the hands of non-Russians and Russians
had become an ethnic minority (accompanied by a detailed table to convey
particulars).2739 Later, there had been attempts to begin national regulation of
cadres from the top down, which essentially meant primarily pushing out
Jews from the managerial positions.2740 By and large, Stalin regulated this
process by either supporting or checking such efforts depending on the
circumstances.
The wartime tension in the attitudes toward Jews was also manifested
during post-war re-evacuation. In Siberia and Central Asia, wartime Jewish
refugees were not welcomed by the local populace, so after the war they mostly
settled in the capitals of Central Asian republics, except for those who moved
back, not to their old shtetls and towns, but into the larger cities.2741
The largest returning stream of refugees fled to Ukraine where they were
met with hostility by the local population, especially because of the return of
Soviet officials and the owners of desirable residential property. This reaction in
the formerly occupied territories was also fueled by Hitlers incendiary
propaganda during the Nazi occupation. Khrushchev, the Head of Ukraine from
1943 (when he was First Secretary of the Communist Party and at the same time
Chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars of Ukraine), not only said
nothing on this topic in his public speeches, treating the fate of Jews during the
occupation with silence, but he also upheld the secret instruction throughout
Ukraine not to employ Jews in positions of authority.
According to the tale of an old Jewish Communist Ruzha-Godes, who
survived the entire Nazi occupation under a guise of being a Pole named
Khelminskaya and was later denied employment by the long-awaited
Communists because of her Jewishness, Khrushchev stated clearly and with his
peculiar frankness: In the past, the Jews committed many sins against the
Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We dont need Jews in our

2739.. . : . .:
, 2001, . 259-260.
2740 , . 310.
2741. . , . 181-182, 195.
Ukraine. It would be better if they didnt return here. They would better go to
Birobidzhan. This is Ukraine. And, we dont want Ukrainian people to infer that
the return of Soviet authority means the return of Jews.2742
In the early September 1945 a Jewish major of the NKVD was brutally
beaten in Kiev by two members of the military. He shot both of them dead. This
incident caused a large-scale massacre of Jews with five fatalities. 2743 There are
documented sources of other similar cases.2744
Sotsialistichesky Vestnik wrote that the Jewish national feelings (which
were exacerbated during the war) overreacted to the numerous manifestations of
anti-Semitism and to the even more common indifference to anti-Semitism.2745
This motif is so typical almost as much as anti-Semitism itself: the
indifference to anti-Semitism was likely to cause outrage. Yes, preoccupied by
their own miseries, people and nations often lose compassion for the troubles of
others. And the Jews are not an exception here. A modern author justly notes: I
hope that I, as a Jew who found her roots and place in Israel, would not be
accused of apostasy if I point out that in the years of our terrible disasters, the
Jewish intellectuals did not raise their voices in defense of the deported nations
of Crimea and the Caucasus.2746
After the liberation of Crimea by the Red Army in 1943, talks started
among circles of the Jewish elite in Moscow about a rebirth of the Crimean
project of 1920s, i.e., about resettling Jews in Crimea. The Soviet government
did not discourage these aspirations, hoping that American Jews would be
more generous in their donations for the Red Army. It is quite possible that
Mikhoels and Feffer [heads of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, EAK], based
on a verbal agreement with Molotov, negotiated with American Zionists about
financial support of the project for Jewish relocation to Crimea during
their triumphal tour of the USA in summer of 1943. The idea of a Crimean
Jewish Republic was also backed by Lozovsky, the then-powerful Assistant
Minister of Foreign Affairs.2747
The EAK had yet another project for a Jewish Republic to establish it in
the place of the former Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
(where, as we have seen in previous chapters, Jewish settlements were
established in the wake of the exile of the Germans). Ester Markish, widow of
EAK member Perets Markish, confirms that he presented a letter concerning
transferring the former German Republic to the Jews.2748
2742 // *, -, 1961, 1, .
19.
2743 ( ). :
, 1996. . 8, . 236.
2744 , 1961, 1, . 19-20; , 1917-
1967 ( -2). -: , 1968, . 146.
2745 // , 1958, 7-8, . 145.
2746. . // , Jersey City, 1988, 12, . 12.
2747.. . , . 428-429.
2748. . // 22: -
. -, 1982, 25, . 203.
 In the Politburo, Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov were the most
positively disposed to the EAK.2749 And, according to rumors, some members
of the Politburo were inclined to support this [Crimean] idea. 2750 On
February 15, 1944, Stalin was forwarded a memorandum about that plan which
was signed by Mikhoels, Feffer and Epshtein. (According to P. Sudoplatov,
although the decision to expel the Tatars from Crimea had been made by Stalin
earlier, the order to carry it out reached Beria on February 14,2751 so the
memorandum was quite timely.)
That was the high point of Jewish hopes. G. V. Kostirenko, a researcher of
this period, writes: the leaders of the EAK plunged into euphoria. They
imagined (especially after Mikhoels and Feffers trip to the West) that with the
necessary pressure, they could influence and steer their governments policy in
the interests of the Soviet Jews, just like the American Jewish elite does it.2752
But Stalin did not approve the Crimean project it did not appeal to him
because of the strategic importance of the Crimea. The Soviet leaders expected
a war with America and probably thought that in such case the entire Jewish
population of Crimea would sympathize with the enemy. (It is reported that at
the beginning of the 1950s some Jews were arrested and told by their MGB
[Ministry for State Security, a predecessor of KGB] investigators: You are not
going to stand against America, are you? So you are our enemies.) Khrushchev
shared those doubts and 10 years later he stated to a delegation of the Canadian
Communist party that was expressing particular interest in the Jewish question
in the USSR: Crimea should not be a center of Jewish colonization, because in
case of war it will become the enemys bridgehead.2753 Indeed, the petitions
about Jewish settlement in Crimea were very soon used as a proof of the state
treason on the part of the members of the EAK.
By the end of WWII the authorities again revived the idea of Jewish
resettlement in Birobidzhan, particularly Ukrainian Jews. From 1946 to 1947
several organized echelons and a number of independent families were sent
there, totaling up to 5-6 thousand persons.2754 However, quite a few returned
disillusioned. This relocation movement withered by 1948. Later, with a general
turn of Stalins politics, arrests among the few Birobidjan Jewish activists
started. (They were accused of artificial inculcation of Jewish culture into the
non-Jewish population and, of course, espionage and of having planned
Birobidzhans secession in order to ally with Japan). This was the de facto end
of the history of Jewish colonization in Birobidzhan. At the end of the 1920s
there were plans to re-settle 60,000 Jews there by the end of the first 5-year

2749.. . , . 430.
2750, . 4, . 602.
2751 . : : 1930-1950 . .: -
, 1997, . 466-467.
2752.. . , . 435.
2753 // , 1957, 5, . 98.
2754.. . // -2, . 189.
planning period. By 1959 there were only 14,000 Jews in Birobidzhan, less than
9% of the population of the region.2755
However, in Ukraine the situation had markedly changed in favor of Jews.
The government was engaged in the fierce struggle with Banderas separatist
fighters and no longer catered to the national feelings of Ukrainians. At the end
of 1946, the Communist Party started a covert campaign against anti-
Semitism, gradually conditioning the population to the presence of Jews among
authorities in different spheres of the national economy. At the same time, in
the beginning of 1947, Kaganovich took over for Khrushchev as the official
leader of Ukrainian Communist Party. The Jews were promoted in the party as
well, of which a particular example was the appointment of a Jew the
Secretary of Zhitomir Obkom.2756
However, the attitudes of many Jews towards this government and its new
policies were justifiably cautious. Soon after the end of the war, when the
former Polish citizens began returning to Poland, many non-Polish Jews
hastily seized this opportunity and relocated there.2757 (What happened after
that in Poland is yet another story: a great overrepresentation of Jews occurred
in the post-war puppet Polish government, among managerial elites and in the
Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences for the Jews
of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar
conflicts: the Jews had played a huge role in economic life of all these
countries, and though they lost their possessions under Hitler, after the war,
when the restitution laws were introduced (they) affected very large numbers
of new owners. Upon their return Jews demanded the restoration of their
property and enterprises that were not nationalized by Communists and this
created a new wave of hostility towards them.2758)
Meanwhile, during these very years the biggest event in world Jewish
history was happening the state of Israel was coming into existence. In 1946-
47, when the Zionists were at odds with Britain, Stalin, perhaps out of anti-
British calculation and or opportunistically hoping to get a foothold there, took
the side of the former. During all of 1947 Stalin, acting through Gromyko in the
UN, actively supported the idea of the creation of an independent Jewish state
in Palestine and supplied the Zionists with a critical supply of Czechoslovak-
made weapons. In May 1948, only two days after the Israeli declaration of
nationhood, the USSR officially recognized that country and condemned hostile
actions of Arabs.
However, Stalin miscalculated to what extent this support would
reinvigorate the national spirit of Soviet Jews. Some of them implored the EAK
to organize a fundraiser for the Israeli military, others wished to enlist as

2755 , . 192, 195-196.

2756. . , . 185-186.
2757 , . 130.
2758 , . 217-218.
volunteers, while still others wanted to form a special Jewish military
division.2759
Amid this burgeoning enthusiasm, Golda Meir arrived to Moscow in
September of 1948 as the first ambassador of Israel and was met with
unprecedented joy in Moscows synagogues and by Moscows Jewish
population in general. Immediately, as the national spirit of Soviet Jews rose
and grew tremendously because of the Catastrophe, many of them began
applying for relocation to Israel. Apparently, Stalin had expected that. Yet it
turned out that many of his citizens wished to run away en masse into, by all
accounts, the pro-Western State of Israel. There, the influence and prestige of
the United States grew, while the USSR was at the same time losing support of
Arab countries. (Nevertheless, the cooling of relations [with Israel] was
mutual. Israel more and more often turned towards American Jewry which
became its main support.2760)
Probably because he was frightened by such a schism in the Jewish national
feelings, Stalin drastically changed policies regarding Jews from the end of
1948 and for the rest of his remaining years. He began acting in his typical style
quietly but with determination, he struck to the core, but with only tiny
movements visible on the surface.
Nevertheless, while the visible tiny ripples hardly mattered, Jewish leaders
had many reasons to be concerned, as they felt the fear hanging in the air. The
then editor of the Polish-Jewish newspaper Folkshtimme, Girsh Smolyar,
recalled the panic that seized Soviet communist Jews after the war.
Emmanuel Kazakevitch and other Jewish writers were distressed. Smolyar had
seen on Ehrenburgs table a mountain of letters literally scream of pain
about current anti-Jewish attitudes throughout the country.2761
Yet Ehrenburg knew his job very well and carried it out. (As became
known much later, it was exactly then that the pre-publication copy of the Black
Book compiled by I. Ehrenburg and B. Grossman, which described the mass
killings and suffering of the Soviet Jews during the Soviet-German war, was
destroyed.) In addition, on September 21, 1948, as a counterbalance to Golda
Meirs triumphal arrival, Pravda published a large article commissioned by
Ehrenburg which stated that the Jews are not a nation at all and that they are
doomed to assimilate.2762 This article created dismay not only among Soviet
Jews, but also in America. With the start of the Cold War, the discrimination
against the Jews in the Soviet Union became one of the main anti-Soviet trump
cards of the West. (As was the inclination in the West towards various ethnic
separatist movements in the USSR, a sympathy that had never previously
gained support among Soviet Jews).
2759.. . , . 403-404.
2760. . , // ( ):
. -, 1987,
96, . 156.
2761. . , // , -, 1987, 96, . 150.
2762. . // , 1948, 21 , . 3.
 However, the EAK, which had been created to address war-time issues,
continued gaining influence. By that time it listed approximately 70 members,
had its own administrative apparatus, a newspaper and a publishing house. It
functioned as a kind of spiritual and physical agent of all Soviet Jews before the
CK (Central Committee) of the VKPb (all-Russian Communist Party of
Bolsheviks), as well as before the West. EAK executives were allowed to do
and to have a lot a decent salary, an opportunity to publish and collect
royalties abroad, to receive and to redistribute gifts from abroad and, finally, to
travel abroad. EAK became the crystallization center of an initially elitist and
upper-echelon and then of a broadly growing Jewish national movement, 2763 a
burgeoning symbol of Jewish national autonomy. For Stalin, the EAK become a
problem which had to be dealt with.
He started with the most important figure, the Head of the Soviet
Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), Lozovsky, who, according to Feffer (who
was vice-chairman of EAK since July 1945), was the spiritual leader of the
EAK knew all about its activities and was its head for all practical purposes.
In the summer of 1946, a special auditing commission from Agitprop of the CK
[of the VKPb] inspected Sovinformburo and found that the apparatus is
polluted [there is] an intolerable concentration of Jews. Lozovsky was
ejected from his post of Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs (just as Litvinov
and Maisky had been) and in summer of 1947 he also lost his post as of Head of
the Sovinformburo.2764
After that, the fate of the EAK was sealed. In September of 1946, the
auditing commission from the Central Committee concluded that the EAK,
instead of leading a rigorous offensive ideological war against the Western and
above all Zionist propaganda supports the position of bourgeois Zionists and
the Bund and in reality it fights for the reactionary idea of a United Jewish
nation. In 1947, the Central Committee stated, that the work among the
Jewish population of the Soviet Union is not a responsibility of the EAK. The
EAKs job was to focus on the decisive struggle against aggression by
international reactionaries and their Zionist agents.2765
However, these events coincided with the pro-Israel stance of the USSR
and the EAK was not dissolved. On the other hand, EAK Chairman Mikhoels
who was the informal leader of Soviet Jewry, had to shed his illusions about
the possibility of influencing the Kremlins national policy via influencing the
Dictators relatives. Here, the suspicion fell mostly on Stalins sonin-law
Grigory Morozov. However, the most active help to the EAK was provided by
Molotovs wife, P.S. Zhemchyzhina, who was arrested in the beginning of 1949,
and Voroshilovs wife, Ekaterina Davidovna (Golda Gorbman), a fanatic
Bolshevik, who had been expelled from the synagogue in her youth.
Abakumov reported that Mikhoels was suspected of gathering private

2763.. . , . 353, 398.

2764 *, . 361, 363-364.
2765 , . 366, 369.
information about the Leader.2766 Overall, according to the MGB he
demonstrated excessive interest in the private life of the Head of the Soviet
Government, while leaders of the EAK gathered materials about the personal
life of J. Stalin and his family at the behest of US Intelligence. 2767 However,
Stalin could not risk an open trial of the tremendously influential Mikhoels, so
Mikhoels was murdered in January 1948 under the guise of an accident. Soviet
Jewry was shocked and terrified by the demise of their spiritual leader.
The EAK was gradually dismantled after that. By the end of 1948 its
premises were locked up, all documents were taken to Lubyanka, and its
newspaper and the publishing house were closed. Feffer and Zuskin, the key
EAK figures, were secretly arrested soon afterwards and these arrests were
denied for a long time. In January 1949 Lozovsky was arrested, followed by the
arrests of a number of other notable members of the EAK in February. They
were intensively interrogated during 1949, but in 1950 the investigation stalled.
(All this coincided [in accord with Stalins understanding of balance] with the
annihilation of the Russian nationalist tendencies in the leadership of the
Leningrad government the so-called anti-party group of Kuznetsov-
Rodionov-Popkov, but those developments, their repression and the
significance of those events were largely overlooked by historians even though
about two thousand party functionaries were arrested and subsequently
executed2768 in 1950 in connection with the Leningrad Affair).
In January 1948, Stalin ordered Jews to be pushed out of Soviet culture. In
his usual subtle and devious manner, the order came through a prominent
editorial in Pravda, seemingly dealing with a petty issue, about one anti-Party
group of theatrical critics.2769 (A more assertive article in Kultura i Zhizn
followed on the next day2770). The key point was the decoding of Russian the
Russian pen-names of Jewish celebrities. In the USSR, many Jews camouflage
their Jewish origins with such artifice, so that it is impossible to figure out
their real names explains the editor of a modern Jewish journal.2771
This article in Pravda had a long but obscure pre-history. In 1946 reports of
the Central Committee it was already noted that out of twenty-eight highly
publicized theatrical critics, only six are Russians. It implied that the majority of
the rest were Jews. Smelling trouble, but still supposing themselves to be
vested with the highest trust of the Party, some theatrical critics, confident of
victory, openly confronted Fadeev in November 1946.2772 Fadeev was the all-
powerful Head of the Union of Soviet Writers and Stalins favorite. And so they

2766.. . , . 376, 379, 404.

2767, . 8, . 243.
2768 , . 248.
2769, 1949, 28 , . 3.
2770 : (
) // , 1949, 30 , . 2-3.
2771. . // , -, 1977, 23, . 216.
2772.. . , . 321, 323.
suffered a defeat. Then the case stalled for a long time and only resurfaced in
1949.
The campaign rolled on through the newspapers and party meetings. G.
Aronson, researching Jewish life in Stalins era writes: The goal of this
campaign was to displace Jewish intellectuals from all niches of Soviet life.
Informers were gloatingly revealing their pen-names. It turned out that E.
Kholodov is actually Meyerovich, Jakovlev is Kholtsman, Melnikov is
Millman, Jasny is Finkelstein, Vickorov is Zlochevsky, Svetov is Sheidman and
so on. Literaturnaya Gazeta worked diligently on these disclosures.2773
Undeniably, Stalin hit the worst-offending spot, the one that highly annoyed
the public. However, Stalin was not so simple as to just blurt out the Jews.
From the first push at the groups of theatrical critics flowed a broad and
sustained campaign against the cosmopolitans (with their Soviet inertial dim-
wittedness they overused this innocent term and spoiled it). Without exception,
all cosmopolitans under attack were Jews. They were being discovered
everywhere. Because all of them were loyal Soviet citizens never suspected of
anything anti-Soviet, they survived the great purges by Yezhov and Yagoda.
Some were very experienced and influential people, sometimes eminent in their
fields of expertise.2774 The exposure of cosmopolitans then turned into a
ridiculous, even idiotic glorification of Russian primacy in all and every area
of science, technology and culture.
Yet the cosmopolitans usually were not being arrested but instead were
publicly humiliated, fired from publishing houses, ideological and cultural
organizations, from TASS, from Glavlit, from literature schools, theaters,
orchestras; some were expelled from the party and publication of their works
was often discouraged.
And the public campaign was expanding, spreading into new fields and
compromising new names. Anti-Jewish cleansing of cosmopolitans was
conducted in the research institutes of the Academy of Science: Institute of
Philosophy (with its long history of internecine feuding between different
cliques), the institutes of Economy, Law, in the Academy of Social Sciences at
the CK of the VKPb, in the School of Law (and then spread to the office of
Public Prosecutor).
Thus, in the Department of History at MGU (Moscow State University),
even a long-standing faithful communist and falsifier, I. I. Minz, member of the
Academy, who enjoyed Stalins personal trust and was awarded with Stalin
Prizes and concurrently chaired historical departments in several universities,
was labeled the head of cosmopolitans in Historical Science. After that
numerous scientific posts at MGU were liberated from his former students and
other Jewish professors.2775

2773. . // -2, . 150.

2774. . // -2, . 150.
2775. . // : ,
.- . , 1981, 28, . 301-320.
 Purges of Jews from technical fields and the natural sciences were
gradually gaining momentum. The end of 1945 and all of 1946 were relatively
peaceful for the Jews of this particular social group. L. Mininberg studied
Jewish contributions in Soviet science and industry during the war: In 1946,
the first serious blow since the end of the war was dealt to the administration
and a big case was fabricated. Its principal victims were mainly Russians
there were no Jews among them, though investigation reports contained
testaments against Israel Solomonovitch Levin, director of the Saratov Aviation
Plant. He was accused on the charge that during the Battle for Stalingrad, two
aviation regiments were not able to take off because of manufacturing defects in
the planes produced by the plant. The charge was real, not made-up by the
investigators. However, Levin was neither fired nor arrested. In 1946, B.L.
Vannikov, L.M. Kaganovich, S.Z. Ginzburg, L.Z. Mekhlis all kept their
Ministry posts in the newly formed government Almost all Jewish former
deputy ministers also retained their positions as assistants to ministers. The
first victims among the Jewish technical elite appeared only in 1947.2776
In 1950, academic A. F. Ioffe was forced to retire from the post of Director
of the Physical-Engineering Institute, which he organized and headed since its
inception in 1918. In 1951, 34 directors and 31 principal engineers of aviation
plants had been fired. This list contained mostly Jews. If in 1942 there were
nearly forty Jewish directors and principal engineers in the Ministry of General
Machine-Building (Ministry of Mortar Artillery) then only three remained by
1953. In the Soviet Army, the Soviet authorities persecuted not only Jewish
generals, but lower ranking officers working on the development of military
technology and weaponry were also removed.2777
Thus, the purging campaigns spread over to the defense, airplane
construction, and automobile industries (though they did not affect the nuclear
branch), primarily removing Jews from administrative, directorial and principal
engineering positions; later purging was expanded onto various bureaucracies.
Yet the genuine, ethnic denominator was never mentioned in the formal
paperwork. Instead, the sacked officials faced charges of economic crimes or
having relatives abroad at a time when conflict with the USA was expected, or
other excuses were used. The purging campaigns rolled over the central cities
and across the provinces. The methods of these campaigns were notoriously
Soviet, in the spirit of 1930s: a victim was inundated in a vicious atmosphere of
terror and as a result often tried to deflect the threat to himself by accusing
others.
By repeating the tide of 1937, albeit in a milder form, the display of Soviet
Power reminded the Jews that they had never become truly integrated and could
be pushed aside at any moment. We do not have indispensable people!

2776.. .
(1941-1945). ., 1995, . 413, 414, 415.
2777 , . 416, 417, 427, 430.
(However, Lavrentiy Beria was tolerant of Jews. At least, in appointments to
positions in government.2778)
Pushing Jews out of prestigious occupations that were crucial for the
ruling elite in the spheres of manufacturing, administration, cultural and
ideological activities, as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of
Jews into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum
in 1948-1953. Positions of any importance in the KGB, party apparatus, and
military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission into
certain educational institutions and cultural and scientific establishments. 2779
Through its fifth item [i.e., the question about nationality] Soviet Jews were
oppressed by the very same method used in the Proletarian Questionnaire, other
items of which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy,
intellectuals and all the rest of the former people since the 1920s.
Although the highest echelon of the Jewish political elite suffered from
administrative perturbations, surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed,
concludes G. V. Kostyrchenko. The main blow fell on the middle and the most
numerous stratum of the Jewish elite officials and also journalists,
professors and other members of the creative intelligentsia. It was these, so
to say, nominal Jews the individuals with nearly complete lack of ethnic ties
who suffered the brunt of the cleansing of bureaucracies after the war.2780
However, speaking of scientific cadres, the statistics are these: at the end
of the 1920s there were 13.6% Jews among scientific researchers in the country,
in 1937 17.5%,2781 and by 1950 their proportion slightly decreased to 15.4%
(25,125 Jews among 162,508 Soviet researchers). 2782 S. Margolina, looking
back from the end of the 1980s concludes that, despite the scale of the
campaign, after the war, the number of highly educated Jews in high positions
always remained disproportionally high. But, in contrast with the former times
of happiness, it certainly had decreased.2783 A.M. Kheifetz recalls a memoir
article of a member of the Academy, Budker, one of the fathers of the Soviet A-
bomb where he described how they were building the first Soviet A-bomb
being exhausted from the lack of sleep and fainting from stress and overwork
and it is precisely those days of persecution of cosmopolitans that were the
most inspired and the happiest in his life.2784
In 1949 among Stalin Prize laureates no less than 13% were Jews, just like
in the previous years. By 1952 there were only 6%. 2785 Data on the number of
2778.. . . 442.
2779, . 6, . 855.
2780.. . , . 515, 518.
2781, . 8, . 190.
2782. . * // , -, 1978, 25, . 120.
2783Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der LAgen: Rulland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin:
Siedler Verlag, 1992, S. 86.
2784 . ( ). : , 1978, .
68-69.
2785.. . . -: - . , 1952,
225-226. 229.
Jewish students in USSR were not published for nearly a quarter of century,
from the pre-war years until 1963. We will examine those in the next chapter.
The genuine Jewish culture that had been slowly reviving after the war was
curtailed and suppressed in 1948-1951. Jewish theatres were no longer
subsidized and the few remaining ones were closed, along with book publishing
houses, newspapers and bookstores.2786 In 1949, the international radio
broadcasting in Yiddish was also discontinued.2787
In the military, by 1953 almost all Jewish generals and approximately
300 colonels and lieutenant colonels were forced to resign from their
positions.2788

As the incarcerated Jewish leaders remained jailed in Lubyanka for over three
years, Stalin slowly and with great caution proceeded in dismantling the EAK.
He was very well aware what kind of international storm would be triggered by
using force. (Luckily, though, he acquired his first H-bomb in 1949.) On the
other hand, he fully appreciated the significance of unbreakable ties between
world Jewry and America, his enemy since his rejection of the Marshall Plan.
Investigation of EAK activities was reopened in January 1952. The accused
were charged with connections to the Jewish nationalist organizations in
America, with providing information regarding the economy of the USSR to
those organizations and also with plans of repopulating Crimea and creating
a Jewish Republic there.2789 Thirteen defendants were found guilty and
sentenced to death: S. A. Lozovsky, I. S. Ysefovich, B. A. Shimeliovich, V. L.
Zuskin, leading Jewish writers D.R. Bergelson, P. D. Marshik, L. M. Kvitko, I.
S. Feffer, D. N. Gofshtein, and also L. Y. Talmi, I. S. Vatenberg, C. S. Vatenberg
Ostrovsky, and E. I. Teumin.2790 They were secretly executed in August.
(Ehrenburg, who was also a member of the EAK, was not even arrested. (He
assumed it was pure luck.) Similarly, the crafty David Zaslavsky survived also.
And even after the execution of the Jewish writers, Ehrenburg continued to
reassure the West that those writers were still alive and writing. 2791 The
annihilation of the Jewish Antifascist Committee went along with similar secret
daughter cases; 110 people were arrested, 10 of them were executed and 5
died during the investigation.2792
In autumn of 1952 Stalin went into the open as arrests among Jews began,
such as arrests of Jewish professors of medicine and among members of literary

2786. . , . 161-163; . .
// -2, . 373.
2787, . 8, . 245.
2788, . 1, . 687.
2789, . 8, . 251.
2790.. . , . 473.
2791. . //-2, . 155-156.
2792.. . , . 507.
circles in Kiev in October 1952. This information immediately spread among
Soviet Jews and throughout the entire world. On October 17th, Voice of
America broadcast about mass repressions among Soviet Jews. 2793 Soviet
Jews were frozen by mortal fear.2794
Soon afterwards in November in Prague, a show trial of Slansky, the Jewish
First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and several other top
state and party leaders took place in a typically loud and populist Stalinist-type
entourage. The trial was openly anti-Jewish with naming world leading Jews
such as Ben Gurion and Morgenthau, and placing them in league with American
leaders Truman and Acheson. The outcome was that eleven were hanged, eight
Jews among them. Summing up the official version, K. Gotwald said: This
investigation and court trial disclosed a new channel through which treason
and espionage permeated the Communist Party. This is Zionism.2795
At the same time, since summer of 1951, the development of the Doctors
Plot was gaining momentum. The case included the accusation of prominent
physicians, doctors to the Soviet leadership, for the criminal treatment of state
leaders. For the secret services such an accusation was nothing new, as similar
accusations had been made against Professor D. D. Pletnev and physicians L. G.
Levin and I. N. Kazakov already during the Bukharin trial in 1937. At that
time, the gullible Soviet public gasped at such utterly evil plots. No one had any
qualms about repeating the same old scenario.
Now we know much more about the Doctors Plot. Initially it was not
entirely an anti-Jewish action; the prosecution list contained the names of
several prominent Russian physicians as well. In essence, the affair was fueled
by Stalins generally psychotic state of mind, with his fear of plots and mistrust
of the doctors, especially as his health deteriorated. By September 1952
prominent doctors were arrested in groups. Investigations unfolded with cruel
beatings of suspects and wild accusations; slowly it turned into a version of
spying-terroristic plot connected with foreign intelligence organizations,
American hirelings, saboteurs in white coats, bourgeois nationalism
all indicating that it was primary aimed at Jews. (Robert Conquest in The Great
Terror follows this particular tragic line of involvement of highly placed
doctors. In 1935, the false death certificate of Kuibyshev was signed by doctors
G. Kaminsky, I. Khodorovsky, and L. Levin. In 1937 they signed a similarly
false death certificate of Ordzhonikidze. They knew so many deadly secrets
could they expect anything but their own death? Conquest writes that Dr. Levin
had cooperated with the Cheka since 1920. Working with Dzerzhinsky,
Menzhinsky, and Yagoda. [he] was trusted by the head of such an
organization. It is factually correct to consider Levin a member of
Yagodas circle in the NKVD. Further, we read something sententious:
Among those outstanding doctors who [in 1937] moved against [Professor of

2793. . // -2, . 152.

2794. . // 22, 1986, 47, . 102.
2795.. . *, . 504.
Medicine] Pletnev and who had signed fierce accusative resolutions against
him, we find the names of M. Vovsi, B. Kogan and V. Zelenin, who in their
turn were subjected to torture by the MGB in 1952-53 in connection with
the case of doctor-saboteurs, as well as two other doctors, N. Shereshevky
and V. Vinogradov who provided a pre-specified death certificate of
Menzhinsky.2796)
On January 3, 1953 Pravda and Izvestiya published an announcement by
TASS about the arrest of a group of doctors-saboteurs. The accusation
sounded like a grave threat for Soviet Jewry, and, at the same time, by a
degrading Soviet custom, prominent Soviet Jews were forced to sign a letter
to Pravda with the most severe condemnation of the wiles of the Jewish
bourgeois nationalists and their approval of Stalins government. Several
dozen signed the letter. (Among them were Mikhail Romm, D. Oistrakh, S.
Marshak, L. Landau, B. Grossman, E. Gilels, I. Dunayevsky and others. Initially
Ehrenburg did not sign it he found the courage to write a letter to Stalin: to
ask your advice. His resourcefulness was unsurpassed indeed. To Ehrenburg, it
was clear that there is no such thing as the Jewish nation and that assimilation
is the only way and that Jewish nationalism inevitably leads to betrayal. Yet
that the letter that was offered to him to sign could be invidiously inferred by
the enemies of our country. He concluded that I myself cannot resolve these
questions, but if leading comrades will let me know [that my signature] is
desired [and] useful for protecting our homeland and for peace in the world,
I will sign it immediately.2797)
The draft of that statement of loyalty was painstakingly prepared in the
administration of the Central Committee and eventually its style became softer
and more respectful. However, this letter never appeared in the press. Possibly
because of the international outrage, the Doctors Plot apparently began to
slow down in the last days of Stalin.2798
After the public announcement, the Doctors Plot created a huge wave of
repression of Jewish physicians all over the country. In many cities and towns,
the offices of State Security began fabricating criminal cases against Jewish
doctors. They were afraid to even go to work, and their patients were afraid to
be treated by them.2799
After the cosmopolitan campaign, the menacing growl of peoples
anger in reaction to the Doctors Plot utterly terrified many Soviet Jews, and
a rumor arose (and then got rooted in the popular mind) that Stalin was planning
a mass eviction of Jews to the remote parts of Siberia and North a fear
reinforced by the examples of postwar deportation of entire peoples. In his latest
work G. Kostyrchenko, a historian and a scrupulous researcher of Stalins
2796 . / . . Firenze: Edizioni Aurora, 1974, . 168,
353, 738-739, 754, 756-757.
2797 . ..
.. // : . ., 1997, 1, . 141-146.
2798.. . , . 682, 693.
2799, . 8, . 254, 255.
Jewish policies, very thoroughly refutes this myth of deportation, proving
that it had never been confirmed, either then or subsequently by any facts, and
even in principle such a deportation would not have been possible.2800
But it is amazing how bewildered were those circles of Soviet Jews, who
were unfailingly loyal to the Soviet-Communist ideology. Many years later, S.
K. told me: There is no single action in my life that I am as ashamed of as my
belief in the genuineness of the Doctors Plot of 1953! that they, perhaps
involuntarily, were involved a foreign conspiracy
An article from the 1960s states that in spite of a pronounced anti-
Semitism of Stalins rule many [Jews] prayed that Stalin stayed alive, as they
knew through experience that any period of weak power means a slaughter of
Jews. We were well aware of the quite rowdy mood of the fraternal nations
toward us.2801
On February 9th a bomb exploded at the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv. On
February 11, 1953 the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. The
conflict surrounding the Doctors Plot intensified due to these events.
And then Stalin went wrong, and not for the first time, right? He did not
understand how the thickening of the plot could threaten him personally, even
within the secure quarters of his inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion
of international anger coincided with the rapid action of internal forces, which
could possibly have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through
Beria (for example, according to Avtorhanovs version.2802)
After a public communiqu about the Doctors Plot Stalin lived only 51
days. The release from custody and the acquittal of the doctors without trial
were perceived by the older generation of Soviet Jews as a repetition of the
Purim miracle: Stalin had perished on the day of Purim, when Esther saved the
Jews of Persia from Haman.2803
On April 3 all the surviving accused in the Doctors Plot were released. It
was publicly announced the next day.
And yet again it was the Jews who pushed the frozen history forward.

2800.. . , . 671-685.
2801. . // . .
, 1968, , 50.
2802. . : ( ). --:
, 1976, . 231-239.
2803. . , // 22, 1985, 42, . 140-141.
 Chapter 23. Before the Six-Day War

On the next day after Stalins death, on March 6, the MGB (Ministry of State
Security) ceased to exist, albeit only formally, as Beria had incorporated it
into his own Ministry of Interior Affairs (MVD). This move allowed him to
disclose the abuses by the MGB, including those of the still publicly
unanounced MGB Minister, Ignatiev (who secretly replaced Abakumov). It
seems that after 1952 Beria was losing Stalins trust and had been gradually
pushed out by Ignatiev-Ryumin during the `Doctors Plot. Thus, by force of
circumstances, Beria became a magnet for the new anti-Stalin opposition. And
now, on April 4, just a month after Stalins death, he enjoyed enough power to
dismiss the Doctors Plot and accuse Ryumin of its fabrication. Then three
months later the diplomatic relations with Israel were restored.
All this reinvigorated hope among the Soviet Jews, as the rise of Beria
could be very promising for them. However, Beria was soon ousted.
Yet because of the usual Soviet inertia, with the death of Stalin many
previously fired Jews were reinstalled in their former positions; during the
period called the thaw, many old Zionists were released from the camps;
during the post-Stalin period, the first Zionist groups started to emerge
initially at local levels.2804
Yet once again the things began to turn unfavorably for the Jews. In March
1954, the Soviet Union vetoed the UN Security Council attempt to open the
Suez Canal to Israeli ships. At the end of 1955, Khrushchev declared a pro-
Arab, anti-Israel turn of Soviet foreign policy. In February 1956, in his famous
report at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev, while speaking profusely about
the massacres of 1937-1938, did not point any attention to the fact that there
were so many Jews among the victims; he did not name Jewish leaders
executed in 1952; and when speaking of the Doctors Plot, he did not stress
that it was specifically directed against the Jews. It is easy to imagine the bitter
feelings this aroused among the Jews, they swept the Jewish communist
circles abroad and even the leadership of those Communist parties, where Jews
constituted a significant percentage of members (such as in the Canadian and
US Communist parties).2805 In April 1956 in Warsaw, under the communist

2804 ( ). :
, 1996. . 8, . 256.
2805. . (1939-1965).
-: . , 1966, . 247.
regime (though with heavy Jewish influence), the Jewish newspaper
Volksstimme published a sensational article, listing the names of Jewish cultural
and social celebrities who perished from 1937-1938 and from 1948-1952. Yet
at the same time the article also condemned the capitalist enemies, Berias
period and welcomed the return of Leninist national policy. The article in
Volksstimme had unleashed a storm.2806
International communist organizations and Jewish social circles loudly
began to demand an explanation from the Soviet leaders. Throughout 1956,
foreign visitors to the Soviet Union openly asked about Jewish situation there,
and particularly why the Soviet government has not yet abandoned the dark
legacy of Stalinism on the Jewish question? 2807 It became a recurrent theme for
the foreign correspondents and visiting delegations of fraternal communist
parties. (Actually, that could be the reason for the loud denouncement in the
Soviet press of the betrayal of Communism by Howard Fast, an American
writer and former enthusiastic champion of Communism. Meanwhile,
hundreds of Soviet Jews from different cities in one form or another
participated in meetings of resurgent Zionist groups and coteries; old Zionists
with connections to relatives or friends in Israel were active in those groups.2808
In May 1956, a delegation from the French Socialist Party arrived in
Moscow. Particular attention was paid to the situation of Jews in the Soviet
Union.2809 Khrushchev found himself in a hot corner now he could not afford
to ignore the questions, yet he knew, especially after experiencing postwar
Ukraine, that the Jews are not likely to be returned to their [high] social
standing like in 1920s and 1930s. He replied: In the beginning of the
revolution, we had many Jews in executive bodies of party and government .
After that, we have developed new cadres . If Jews wanted to occupy
positions of leadership in our republics today, it would obviously cause
discontent among the local people . If a Jew, appointed to a high office,
surrounds himself with Jewish colleagues, it naturally provokes envy and
hostility toward all Jews. (The French publication Socialist Herald calls
strange and false the Khrushchevs point about surrounding himself with
Jewish colleagues.) In the same discussion, when Jewish culture and schools
were addressed, Khrushchev explained that if Jewish schools were established,
there probably would not be many prospective students. The Jews are scattered
all over the country . If the Jews were required to attend a Jewish school, it
certainly would cause outrage. It would be understood as a kind of a ghetto.2810

2806 , . 247-248.
2807 // , -, 1961, 1, .
20.
2808, . 8, . 257.
2809 // , 1961, 1, . 20.
2810 ..
: Realites, Paris, Mai 1957, p. 64-67, 101-104.
(1961, 1, . 21).
 Three months later, in August 1956, a delegation of the Canadian
Communist Party visited the USSR and it stated outright that it had a special
mission to achieve clarity on the Jewish question. Thus, in the postwar years,
the Jewish question was becoming a central concern of the western communists.
Khrushchev rejected all accusations of anti-Semitism as a slander against him
and the party. He named a number of Soviet Jews to important posts, he even
mentioned his Jewish daughter-in-law, but then he quite suddenly switched
to the issue of good and bad features of each nation and pointed out several
negative features of Jews, among which he mentioned their political
unreliability. Yet he neither mentioned any of their positive traits, nor did he
talk about other nations.2811
In the same conversation, Khrushchev expressed his agreement with
Stalins decision against establishing a Crimean Jewish Republic, stating that
such [Jewish] colonization of the Crimea would be a strategic military risk for
the Soviet Union. This statement was particularly hurtful to the Jewish
community. The Canadian delegation insisted on publication of a specific
statement by the Central Committee of Communist Party of the Soviet Union
about the sufferings of Jews, but it was met with firm refusal as other nations
and republics, which also suffered from Berias crimes against their culture and
intelligentsia, would ask with astonishment why this statement covers only
Jews? (S. Schwartz dismissively comments: The pettiness of this
argumentation is striking.2812)
Yet it did not end at that. Secretly, influential foreign Jewish communists
tried to obtain explanations about the fate of the Jewish cultural elite, and in
October of the same year, twenty-six Western progressive Jewish leaders and
writers appealed publicly to Prime-Minister Bulganin and President
Voroshilov, asking them to issue a public statement about injustices committed
[against Jews] and the measures the goverment had designed to restore the
Jewish cultural institutions.2813
Yet during both the interregnum of 1953-1957 and then in Khrushchevs
period, the Soviet policies toward Jews were inconsistent, wary, circumspect
and ambivalent, thus sending signals in all directions.
In particular, the summer of 1956, which was filled with all kinds of social
expectations in general, had also became the apogee of Jewish hopes. One
Surkov, the head of the Union of Writers, in a conversation with a communist
publisher from New York City mentioned plans to establish a new Jewish
publishing house, theater, newspaper and quarterly literary magazine; there were
also plans to organize a countrywide conference of Jewish writers and cultural
celebrities. It also noted that a commission for reviving the Jewish literature in
Yiddish had been already established. In 1956, many Jewish writers and

2811J.B. Salsberg, Talks with Soviet Leaders on the Jewish Question // Jewish Life, Febr. 1957.
. . (1961, 1, . 20).
2812. . *, . 250.
2813 *, . 249-251.
journalists gathered in Moscow again.2814 The Jewish activists later recalled
that the optimism inspired in all of us by the events of 1956 did not quickly
fade away.2815
Yet the Soviet government continued with its meaningless and aimless
policies, discouraging any development of an independent Jewish culture. It is
likely that Khrushchev himself was strongly opposed to it.
And then came new developments the Suez Crisis, where Israel, Britain
and France allied in attacking Egypt (Israel is heading to suicide, formidably
warned the Soviet press), and the Hungarian Uprising, with its anti-Jewish
streak, nearly completely concealed by history,2816 (resulting, perhaps, from the
overrepresentation of Jews in the Hungarian KGB). (Could this be also one of
the reasons, even if a minor one, for the complete absence of Western support
for the rebellion? Of course, at this time the West was preoccupied with the
Suez Crisis. And yet wasnt it a signal to the Soviets suggesting that it would be
better if the Jewish theme be kept hushed?)
Then, a year later, Khrushchev finally overpowered his highly placed
enemies within the party and, among others, Kaganovitch was cast down.
Could it really be such a big deal? The latter was not the only one ousted
and even then, he was not the principal figure among the dethroned; and he was
definitely not thrown out because of his Jewishness. Yet from the Jewish point
of view, his departure symbolized the end of an era. Some looked around and
counted the Jews disappeared not only from the ruling sections of the party,
but also from the leading governmental circles.2817
It was time to pause and ponder thoroughly what did the Jews really think
about such new authorities?
David Burg, who emigrated from the USSR in 1956, came upon a formula
on how the Jews should treat the Soviet rule. (It proved quite useful for the
authorities): To some, the danger of anti-Semitism `from below seems greater
than the danger of anti-Semitism `from above; though the government
oppresses us, it nevertherless allows us to exist. If, however, a revolutionary
change comes, then during the inevitable anarchy of the transition period we
will simply be exterminated. Therefore, lets hold on to the government no
matter how bad it is.2818
We repeatedly encountered similar concerns in the 1930s that the Jews
should support the Bolshevik power in the USSR because without it their fate
2814 , . 241, 272.
2815. . : [] // 22:
-
. -, 1984, 38, . 132.
2816Andrew Handler. Where Familiarity with Jews Breeds Contempt // Red Star, Blue Star: The
Lives and Times of Jewish Students in Communist Hungary (1948-1956). New-York:
Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 36-37.
2817. . // ,
1917-1967 ( -2). -: , 1968, . 360-361.
2818David Burg. Die Judenfrage in Der Sowjetunion // Der Anti-kommunist, Miinchen, Juli-
August 1957, 12, S.35.
would be even worse. And now, even though the Soviet power had further
deteriorated, the Jews had no other choice but hold on to it as before.
The Western world and particularly the United States always heeded such
recommendations, even during the most strained years of the Cold War. In
addition, socialist Israel was still full of communist sympathizers and could
forgive the Soviet Union a lot for its role in the defeat of Hitler. Yet how then
could Soviet anti-Semitism be interpreted? In this aspect, the recommendation
of D. Burg stood up to the acute social demand to move emphasis from the
anti-Semitism of the Soviet government to the anti-Semitism of the Russian
people that ever-present curse.
So now some Jews have even fondly recalled the long-disbanded YevSek
[the Jewish Section of the Central Committee, dismantled in 1930 when
Dimanshtein and its other leaders were shot]. Even though back in the 1920s it
seemed overly pro-Communist, the YevSek was to certain extent a guardian of
Jewish national interests an organ that produced some positive work as
well.2819
In the meantime, Khrushchevs policy remained equivocal; it is reasonable
to assume that though Khrushchev himself did not like Jews, he did not want to
fight against them, realizing the international political counter-productivity of
such an effort. In 1957-1958, Jewish musical performances and public literary
clubs were authorized and appeared in many cities countrywide. (For example,
in 1961, Jewish literary soirees and Jewish song performances were attended
by about 300,000 people.2820) Yet at the same time, the circulation of Warsaws
Volksstimme was discontinued in the Soviet Union, thus cutting the Soviet Jews
off from an outside source of Jewish information.2821 In 1954, after a long break,
Sholom Aleichems The Adventures of Mottel was again published in Russian,
followed by several editions of his other books and their translations into other
languages; in 1959 a large edition of his collected works was produced as well.
In 1961 in Moscow, the Yiddish magazine Sovetish Heymland was established
(though it strictly followed the official policy line). Publications of books by
Jewish authors, who were executed in Stalins times, were resumed in Yiddish
and Russian, and one even could hear Jewish tunes on the broadcasts of the All-
Soviet Union radio.2822 By 1966, about one hundred Jewish authors were
writing in Yiddish in the Soviet Union, and almost all of the named authors
simultaneously worked as Russian language journalists and translators, and
many of them worked as teachers in the Russian schools.2823 However, the
Jewish theater did not re-open until 1966. In 1966, S. Schwartz defined the

2819. . *, . 238.
2820 , . 283-287; , . 8, . 258.
2821. . , . 281.
2822. . : // :
.-, - . ,
1989, 1, . 65-66.
2823. . // -2, . 379-380.
Jewish situation [in the USSR] as cultural orphanhood. 2824 Yet another author
bitterly remarks: The general lack of enthusiasm and interest from the wider
Jewish population toward those cultural undertakings cannot be
explained solely by official policies . With rare exceptions, during those
years the Jewish actors performed in half-empty halls. Books of Jewish
writers were not selling well.2825
Similarly ambivalent, but more hostile policies of the Soviet authorities in
Khrushchevs period were implemented against the Jewish religion. It was a
part of Khrushchevs general anti-religious assault; it is well known how
devastating it was for the Russian Orthodox Church. Since the 1930s, not a
single theological school functioned in the USSR. In 1957 a yeshiva a school
for training rabbis opened in Moscow. It accommodated only 35 students, and
even those were being consistently pushed out under various pretexts such as
withdrawal of residence registration in Moscow. Printing of prayer books and
manufacturing of religious accessories was hindered. Up to 1956, before the
Jewish Passover matzah was baked by state-owned bakeries and then sold in
stores. Beginning in 1957, however, baking of matzah was obstructed and since
1961 it was banned outright almost everywhere. One day, the authorities would
not interfere with receiving parcels with matzah from abroad, another day, they
stopped the parcels at the customs, and even demanded recipients to express in
the press their outrage against the senders.2826 In many places, synagogues were
closed down. In 1966, only 62 synagogues were functioning in the entire
Soviet Union.2827 Yet the authorities did not dare to shut down the synagogues
in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and in the capitals of the republics. In the 1960s,
there used to be extensive worship services on holidays with large crowds of
10,000 to 15,000 on the streets around synagogues.2828 C. Schwartz notes that in
the 1960s Jewish religious life was in severe decline, yet he large-mindedly
reminds us that it was the result of the long process of secularization that began
in Russian Jewry in the late 19th Century. (The process, which, he adds, has
also succeeded in extremely non-communist Poland between the First and
Second World Wars.2829) Judaism in the Soviet Union lacked a united control
center; yet when the Soviet authorities wanted to squeeze out a political show
from the leading rabbis for foreign policy purposes, be it about the well-being of
Judaism in the USSR or outrage against the nuclear war, the government was
perfectly able to stage it.2830 The Soviet authorities had repeatedly used Jewish
religious leaders for foreign policy goals. For example, in November 1956 a

2824. . , . 280, 288.

2825. . : // , 1989,
1, . 66.
2826. . , . 304-308.
2827, . 8, . 259.
2828. . // -2, . 358.
2829. . , . 290.
2830 , . 294-296.
group of rabbis issued a protest against the actions of Israel during the Suez
War.2831
Another factor, which aggravated the status of Judaism in the USSR after
the Suez War, was the growing fashionability of what was termed the struggle
against Zionism. Zionism, being, strictly speaking, a form of socialism, should
naturally had been seen as a true brother to the party of Marx and Lenin. Yet
after the mid-1950s, the decision to secure the friendship of the Arabs drove the
Soviet leaders toward persecution of Zionism. However, for the Soviet masses
Zionism was a distant, unfamiliar and abstract phenomenon. Therefore, to flesh
out this struggle, to give it a distinct embodiment, the Soviet government
presented Zionism as a caricature composed of the characteristic and eternal
Jewish images. The books and pamphlets allegedly aimed against Zionism also
contained explicit anti-Judaic and anti-Jewish messages. If in the Soviet Union
of 1920-1930s Judaism was not as brutally persecuted as the Russian Orthodox
Christianity, then in 1957 a foreign socialist commentator noted how that year
signified a decisive intensification of the struggle against Judaism, the
turning point in the struggle against the Jewish religion, and that the
character of struggle betrays that it is directed not only against Judaism, but
against the Jews in general.2832 There was one stirring episode: in 1963 in Kiev,
the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences published 12,000 copies of a brochure
Unadorned Judaism in Ukrainian, yet it was filled with such blatant anti-Jewish
caricatures that it provoked a large-scale international outcry, joined even by the
communist friends (who were financially supported by Moscow), such as the
leaders of the American and British communist parties, newspapers
LHumanite, LUnita, as well as a pro-Chinese communist newspaper from
Brussels, and many others. The UN Human Rights Commission demanded an
explanation from its Ukrainian representative. The World Jewish Cultural
Association called for the prosecution of the author and the cartoonist. The
Soviet side held on for awhile, insisting that except for the drawings, the book
deserves a generally positive assessment.2833 Finally, even Pravda had to admit
that it was indeed an ill-prepared brochure with erroneous statements
and illustrations that may offend feelings of religious people or be interpreted as
anti-Semitic, a phenomenon that, as is universally known, does not and
cannot exist in our country.2834 Yet at the same time Izvestia stated that
although there were certain drawbacks to the brochure, its main idea is no
doubt right.2835
There were even several arrests of religious Jews from Moscow and
Leningrad accused of espionage [conversations during personal meetings in

2831, . 8, . 258.
2832 // , 1965,
4, . 67.
2833 // *, 1965,
4, . 68-73.
2834 // , 1964, 4 , . 4.
2835 // , 1964, 4 , . 4.
synagogues] for a capitalistic state [Israel] with synagogues allegedly used as
fronts for various criminal activities2836 to scare others more effectively.

Although there were already no longer any Jews in the most prominent
positions, many still occupied influential and important second-tier posts
(though there were exceptions: for example, Veniamin Dymshits smoothly ran
Gosplan (the State Planning Committee) from 1962, while being at the same
time the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of USSR and a member
of Central Committee from 1961 to 1986 2837). Why, at one time the Jews were
joining NKVD and the MVD in such numbers that even now, after all
purges of the very Jewish spirit, a few individuals miraculously remained, such
as the famous Captain Joffe in a camp in Mordovia.2838
According to the USSR Census of 1959, 2,268,000 Jews lived in the Soviet
Union. (Yet there were caveats regarding this figure: Everybody knows that
there are more Jews in the Soviet Union than the Census showed, as on the
Census day, a Jew states his nationality not according to his passport, but any
nationality he wishes.2839) Of those, 2,162,000 Jews lived in the cities, i.e.,
95,3% of total population much more than 82% in 1926 or 87% in 1939. 2840
And if we glance forward into the 1970 Census, the observed increase in the
number of Jews in Moscow and Leningrad is apparently caused not by natural
growth but by migration from other cities (in spite of all the residential
restrictions). Over these 11 years, at least several thousand Jews relocated to
Kiev. The concentration of Jews in the large cities had been increasing for many
decades.2841
These figures are very telling for those who know about the differences in
living standards between the urban and the rural populations in the Soviet
Union. G. Rosenblum, the editor of the prominent Israeli newspaper, Yedioth
Ahronoth, recalls an almost anecdotal story by Israeli Ambassador to Moscow
Dr. Harel about his tour of the USSR in the mid-1960s. In a large kolkhoz near
Kishinev he was told that the Jews who work here want to meet [him]. [The
Israeli] was very happy that there were Jews in the kolkhoz (love of
agriculture a good sign for Israel). He recounts: Three Jews came to meet
me one was a cashier, another editor of the kolkhozs wall newspaper and
the third one was a kind of economic manager. I couldnt find any other. So,
what the Jews used to do [i.e. before], they are still doing. G. Rosenblum

2836. . , . 303.
2837 . 2- ., . . ., 1994. . 1, . 448.
2838. . // , -. 1974. 117, . 185.
2839. . // ( ):
. -. 1978, 26, . 113-114.
2840, . 8, . 298, 300.
2841. . // 22, 1981, 21, . 112-
113.
confirms this: Indeed, the Soviet Jews in their masses did not take to the
physical work.2842 L. Shapiro concludes, Conversion of Jews to agriculture
ended in failure despite all the efforts of public Jewish organizations and
the assistance of the state.2843
In Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev the cities enjoying the highest living and
cultural standards in the country, the Jews, according to the 1959 Census,
constituted 3.9%, 5.8%, and 13.9 % of the population, respectively, which is
quite a lot, considering that they accounted only for 1.1% of the entire
population of the USSR.2844
So it was that this extremely high concentration of Jews in urban areas
95% of all Soviet Jews lived in the cities that made the system of
prohibitions and restrictions particularly painful for them. (As we mentioned
in the previous chapter, this system was outlined back in the early 1940s.) And
although the restrictive rules have never been officially acknowledged and
officials stoutly denied their existence, these rules and restrictions very
effectively barred the Jews from many spheres of action, professions and
positions.2845
Some recall a disturbing rumor circulating then among the Jews: allegedly,
Khrushchev said in one of his unpublished speeches that as many Jews will be
accepted into the institutions of higher education as work in the coal mines. 2846
Perhaps, he really just blurted it out in his usual manner, because such
balancing was never carried out. Yet by the beginning of 1960s, while the
absolute number of Jewish students increased, their relative share decreased
substantially when compared to the pre-war period: if in 1936 the share of Jews
among students was 7.5 times higher than that in the total population, 2847 then
by 1960s it was only 2.7 times higher. These new data on the distribution of
students in higher and secondary education by nationality were published for the
first time (in the post-war period) in 1963 in the statistical annual report, The
National Economy of the USSR,2848 and a similar table was annually produced
up to 1972. In terms of the absolute number of students in institutions of higher
education and technical schools in the 1962-1963 academic year, Jews were
fourth after the three Slavic nations (Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians), with
79,300 Jewish students in institutions of higher education out of a total
2,943,700 students (2.69%). In the next academic year 1963-1964, the number
of Jewish students increased to 82,600, while the total number of students in the

2842. , . . : *: [] // ,
-, 1977, 24, . 120.
2843. . // -2, . 346.
2844, . 8, . 300.
2845. . // , 1989, 1, . 65.
2846. . // :
. , 1968, . 55.
2847, . 8, . 190.
2848 1963 : . .: ,
1965, . 579.
USSR reached 3,260,700 (2.53%). This share remained almost constant until
the 1969-1970 academic year; 101,000 Jewish students out of total 4,549,900.
Then the Jewish share began to decline and in 1972-1973 it was 1.91%: 88,500
Jewish students out of total 4,630,246. 2849 (This decline coincided with the
beginning of the Jewish immigration to Israel.)
The relative number of Jewish scientists also declined in 1960s, from 9.5%
in 1960 to 6.1% in 1973.2850 During those same years, there were tens of
thousands Jewish names in the Soviet art and literature,2851 including 8.5% of
writers and journalists, 7.7% of actors and artists, more than 10% of judges and
attorneys, and about 15% doctors.2852 Traditionally, there were always many
Jews in medicine, yet consider the accursed Soviet psychiatry, which in those
years began locking up healthy people in mental institutions. And who were
those psychiatrists? Listing the Jewish occupations, M.I. Heifets writes:
`Psychiatry is a Jewish monopoly, a friend, a Jewish psychiatrist, told me, just
before [my] arrest; `we began to get Russians only recently and even then as the
result of an order [translators note: admission into medical residency training
was regulated at local and central levels; here author indicates that admission of
ethnically Russian doctors into advanced psychiatry training was mandated
from the higher levels]. He provides examples: the Head Psychiatrist of
Leningrad, Professor Averbukh, provides his expertise for the KGB in the Big
House; in Moscow there was famous Luntz; in the Kaluga Hospital there was
Lifshitz and his Jewish gang. When Heifetz was arrested, and his wife began
looking for a lawyer with a clearance, that is, with a permission from the
KGB to work on political cases, she did not find a single Russian among
them as all such lawyers were Jews2853).
In 1956, Furtseva, then the First Secretary of Moscow Gorkom (the Citys
Party Committee), complained that in some offices Jews constitute more than
half of the staff.2854 (I have to note for balance that in those years the presence of
Jews in the Soviet apparatus was not detrimental. The Soviet legal machinery
was in its essence stubbornly and hardheartedly anti-human, skewed against any
man in need, be it a petitioner or just a visitor. So it often happened that the
Russian officials in Soviet offices, petrified by their power, looked for any
excuse to triumphantly turn away a visitor; in contrast, one could find much
more understanding in a Jewish official and resolve an issue in a more humane
way). L. Shapiro provides examples of complaints that in the national republics,

2849 1969 . ., 1970, . 690;

1972 . ., 1972, . 651.
2850. . // , -, 1978, 25, . 120.
2851. . // , 1989, 1, . 66.
2852. , . . :
// (1917-1967). :
, 1975, . 180.
2853 . ( )*. : , 1978, .
63-65, 67, 70.
2854. . // -2, . 363.
the Jews were pushed out and displaced from the bureaucratic apparatus by
native intelligentsia2855 yet it was a common and officially-mandated system of
preferences in the ethnic republics [to affirm the local cadres], and Russians
were displaced just as well.
This reminds me of an example from contemporary American life. In 1965,
the New York Division of the American Jewish Committee had conducted a
four-months-long unofficial interview of more than a thousand top officials in
New York City banks. Based on its results, the American Jewish Committee
mounted a protest because less than 3% of those surveyed were Jews, though
they constituted one quarter of the population of that is, the Committee
demanded proportional representation. Then the chairman of the Association of
Banks of New York responded that banks, according to law, do not hire on the
basis of race, creed, color or national origin and do not keep records of such
categories (that would be our accursed fifth article [the requirement in the
Soviet internal passport nationality]!). (Interestingly, the same American
Jewish Committee had conducted a similar study about the ethnic composition
of management of the fifty largest U.S. public utility services two years before,
and in 1964 it in similar vein it studied industrial enterprises in the Philadelphia
region.)2856
Yet let us return to the Soviet Jews. Many Jewish emigrants loudly
advertised their former activity in the periodical-publishing and film-making
industries back in the USSR. In particular, we learn from a Jewish author that
it was due to his [Syrokomskiys] support that all top positions in
Literaturnaya Gazeta became occupied by Jews.2857
Yet twenty years later we read a different assessment of the time: The new
anti-Semitism grew stronger and by the second half of the 1960s it already
amounted to a developed system of discreditation, humiliation and isolation of
the entire people.2858
So how can we reconcile such conflicting views? How can we reach a calm
and balanced assessment?
Then from the high spheres inhabited by economic barons there came
alarming signals, signals that made the Jews nervous. To a certain extent,
Jewish activity in the Soviet Union concentrated in the specific fields of
economy along a characteristic pattern, well-known to Jewish sociologists.2859
By then, at the end of 1950s, Nikita [Khrushchev] suddenly realized that the key
spheres of the Soviet economy are plagued by rampant theft and fraud.
In 1961, an explicitly anti-Semitic campaign was initiated against the ?
theft of socialist property.2860 Beginning in 1961, a number of punitive decrees
of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were passed. The first one dealt with
2855 .
2856New York Times, 1965, October 21, p. 47.
2857. . // , -, 1985, 87, . 147.
2858. . // , 1989, 1, . 66.
2859. . // -2, . 362.
2860, . 8, . 261.
foreign currency speculations, another with bribes, and still another later
introduced capital punishment for the aforementioned crimes, at the same time
lawlessly applying the death penalty retroactively, for the crimes committed
before those decrees were issued (as, for example, the case of J. Rokotov and B.
Faybishenko). Executions started in the very first year. During the first nine
trials, eleven individuals were sentenced to death among them were perhaps,
six Jews.2861 The Jewish Encyclopedia states it more specifically, In 1961-
1964, thirty-nine Jews were executed for economic crimes in the RSFSR and
seventy-nine in Ukraine, and forty-three Jews in other republics. 2862 In these
trials, the vast majority of defendants were Jews. (The publicity was such that
the court reports indicated the names and patronymics of the defendants, which
was the normal order of pleadings, yet it was getting absolutely clear from that
that they were Jews.2863)
Next, in a large court trial in Frunze in 1962, nineteen out of forty-six
defendants were apparently Jewish. There is no reason to think that this new
policy was conceived as a system of anti-Jewish measures. Yet immediately
upon enforcement, the new laws acquired distinct anti-Jewish flavor, the
author of the quote obviously points out to the publication of the full names of
defendants, including Jewish ones; other than that, neither the courts, nor the
government, nor the media made any generalizations or direct accusations
against the Jews. And even when Sovetskaya Kyrgizia wrote that they occupied
different posts, but they were closely linked to each other, it never clarified the
begged question how were they linked? The newspaper treated this issue with
silence, thus pushing the reader to the thought that the nucleus of the criminal
organization was composed of the closely linked individuals. Yet closely
linked by what? By their Jewishness. So the newspaper emphasized the Jews
in this case.2864 Yet people can be closely linked by any illegal transaction,
greed, swindling or fraud. And, amazingly, nobody argued that those individuals
could be innocent (though they could have been innocent). Yet to name them
was equal to Jew-baiting.
Next, in January 1962, came the Vilnius case of speculators in foreign
currency. All eight defendants were Jews (during the trial, non-Jewish members
of the political establishment involved in the case escaped public naming a
usual Soviet trick). This time, there was an explicit anti-Jewish sentiment from
the prosecution: The deals were struck in a synagogue, and the arguments were
settled with the help of wine.2865
S. Schwartz is absolutely convinced that this legal and economic
harassment was nothing else but rampant anti-Semitism, yet he completely
disregards the tendency of Jews to concentrate their activity in the specific
spheres of economy. Similarly, the entire Western media interpreted this as a
2861. . , . 326-327, 329.
2862, . 8, . 261.
2863. . // , . 55.
2864. . , . 330-333.
2865 , . 333-334.
brutal campaign against Jews, the humiliation and isolation of the entire people;
Bertrand Russell sent a letter of protest to Khrushchev and got a personal
response from the Soviet leader.2866 However, after that, the Soviet authorities
apparently had second thoughts when they handled the Jews.
In the West, the official Soviet anti-Semitism began to be referred to as the
most pressing issue in the USSR (ignoring any more acute issues) and the
most proscribed subject. (Though there were numerous other proscribed issues
such as forced collectivization or the surrender of three million Red Army
soldiers in the year of 1941 alone, or the murderous nuclear experimentation
on our own Soviet troops on the Totskoye range in 1954.) Of course, after
Stalins death, the Communist Party avoided explicit anti-Jewish statements.
Perhaps, they practiced incendiary invitation-only meetings and briefings
that would have been very much in the Soviet style. Solomon Schwartz rightly
concludes: Soviet anti-Jewish policy does not have any sound or rational
foundation, the strangulation of the Jewish cultural life appears puzzling.
How can such bizarre policy be explained?2867
Still, when all living things in the country were being choked, could one
really expect that such vigorous and agile people would escape a similar lot? To
that, the Soviet foreign policy agendas of 1960s added their weight: the USSR
was designing an anti-Israel campaign. Thus, they came up with a convenient,
ambiguous and indefinite term of anti-Zionism, which became a sword of
Damocles hanging above the entire Jewish population of the country.2868
Campaigning against Zionism in the press became a sort of impenetrable
shield as its obvious anti-Semitic nature became unprovable. Moreover, it
sounded menacing and dangerous Zionism is the instrument of the American
imperialism. So the Jews had to prove their loyalty in one way or other, to
somehow convince the people around them that they had no connection to their
own Jewishness, especially to Zionism.2869
The feelings of ordinary Jews in the Soviet Union became the feelings of
the oppressed as vividly expressed by one of them: Over the years of
persecutions and vilifications, the Jews developed a certain psychological
complex of suspicion to any contact coming from non-Jews. In everything they
are ready to see implicit or explicit hints on their nationality . The Jews can
never publicly declare their Jewishness, and it is formally accepted that this
should be kept silent, as if it was a vice, or a past crime.2870
An incident in Malakhovka in October 1959 added substantially to that
atmosphere. On the night of October 4, in Malakhovka, a settlement half an
hour from Moscow with 30,000 inhabitants, about 10% of whom are Jews
, the roof of the synagogue caught fire along with the house of the Jewish
2866 . .. // , 1963, 1 , . 1.
2867. . , . 421-422.
2868. . // . 1989, 1, . 65.
2869. . // , 1989, 1, . 66-67.
2870. . // , . 48,
55.
cemetery keeper [and] the wife of the keeper died in the fire. On the same
night, leaflets were scattered and posted across Malakhovka: `Away with the
Jews in commerce! We saved them from the Germans yet they became
arrogant so fast that the Russian people do not understand any longer whos
living on whose land.2871
Growing depression drove some Jews to such an extreme state of mind as
that described by D. Shturman: some Jewish philistines developed a hatred
toward Israel, believing it to be the generator of anti-Semitism in the Soviet
politics. I remember the words of one succesful Jewish teacher: `One good
bomb dropped on Israel would make our life much easier.2872
Yet that was an ugly exception indeed. In general, the rampant anti-Zionist
campaign triggered a consolidation of the sense of Jewishness in people and
the growth of sympathy towards Israel as the outpost of the Jewish nation.2873
There is yet another explanation of the social situation in those years: yes,
under Khrushchev, fears for their lives had become the things of the past for
the Soviet Jews, but the foundations of new anti-Semitism had been laid, as
the young generation of political establishment fought for caste privileges,
seeking to occupy the leading positions in arts, science, commerce, finance,
etc. There the new Soviet aristocracy encountered Jews, whose share in those
fields was traditionally high. The social structure of the Jewish population,
which was mainly concentrated in the major centers of the country, reminded
the ruling elite of their own class structure.2874
Doubtless, such encounter did take place; it was an epic crew change in
the Soviet ruling establishment, switching from the Jewish elite to the Russian
one. It had clearly resulted in antagonism and I remember those conversations
among the Jews during Khrushchevs era they were full of not only ridicule,
but also of bad insults with the ex-villagers, muzhiks, who have infiltrated the
establishment.
Yet altogether all the various social influences combined with the great
prudence of the Soviet authorities led to dramatic alleviation of prevalence and
acuteness of modern Soviet anti-Semitism by 1965, which became far inferior
to what had been observed during the war and the first post-war years, and it
appears that a marked attenuation, maybe even a complete dying out of `the
percentage quote is happening.2875 Overall, in the 1960s the Jewish worldview
was rather positive. This is what we consistently hear from different authors.
(Contrast this to what we just read, that the new anti-Semitism grew in strength
in the 1960s.) The same opinion was expressed again twenty years later

2871 , 1959, 12, . 240-241.

2872. . : [] // 22,
1978, 3, . 180.
2873. . , . 395.
2874. . // , 1989, 1, . 64-65.
2875. . , . 372, 409.
Khrushchevs era was one of the most peaceful periods of the Soviet history
for the Jews.2876
In 1956-1957, many new Zionist societies sprang up in the USSR,
bringing together young Jews who previously did not show much interest in
Jewish national problems or Zionism. An important impetus for the awakening
of national consciousness among Soviet Jews and for the development of a
sense of solidarity with the State of Israel was the Suez Crisis [1956]. Later,
The International Youth Festival [Moscow, 1957] became a catalyst for the
revival of the Zionist movement in the USSR among a certain portion of Soviet
Jews Between the festival and the Six-Day War [1967], Zionist activity in
the Soviet Union was gradually expanding. Contacts of Soviet Jews with the
Israeli Embassy became more frequent and less dangerous. Also, the
importance of Jewish Samizdat increased dramatically.2877
During the so-called Khrushchevs thaw period (the end of 1950s to the
beginning of the 1960s), Soviet Jews were spiritually re-energized; they shook
off the fears and distress of the previous age of the Doctors Plot and the
persecution of cosmopolitan. It even became fashionable in the
metropolitan society to be a Jew; the Jewish motif entered Samizdat and
poetic soirees then so popular among the young. Rimma Kazakova even
ventured to declare her Jewish identity from the stage. Yevtushenko quickly
caught the air and expressed it in 1961 in his Babi Yar2878, proclaiming himself a
Jew in spirit. His poem (and the courage of Literaturnaya Gazeta) was a literary
trumpet call for all of Soviet and world Jewry. Yevtushenko recited his poem
during a huge number of poetic soirees, always accompanied by a roar of
applause. After a while, Shostakovich, who often ventured into Jewish themes,
set Yevtushenkos poem into his 13th Symphony. Yet its public performance
was limited by the authorities. Babi Yar spread among Soviet and foreign
Jewries as a reinvigorating and healing blast of air, a truly revolutionary act
in the development of the social consciousness in the Soviet Union; it became
the most significant event since the dismissal of the `Doctors Plot.2879
In 1964-65 Jewish themes returned into popular literature; take, for
example, Summer in Sosnyaki by Anatoliy Rybakov or the diary of Masha
Rolnik2880 (written apparently under heavy influence of Diary of Anne
Frank2881).
After the ousting of Khrushchev from all his posts, the official policy
towards Jews was softened somewhat. The struggle against Judaism abated and
nearly all restrictions on baking matzah were abolished . Gradually, the

2876 . ? // : , ,
.- . --, 1987, 146, . 189.
2877, . 8, . 262-263.
2878R. Rutman // Soviet Jewish Affairs, London, 1974, Vol. 4, 2, p. 11.
2879. . , . 371.
2880: , 1964, 12; . //
, 1965, 2 3.
2881. . , . 373.
campaign against economic crimes faded away too . Yet the Soviet press
unleashed a propaganda campaign against Zionist activities among the Soviet
Jews and their connections to the Israeli Embassy.2882
All these political fluctuations and changes in the Jewish policies in the
Soviet Union did not pass unnoticed but served to awaken the Jews.
In the 1959 Census, only 21% Jews named Yiddish as their first language
(in 1926 -72%).2883 Even in 1970s they used to say that Russian Jewry, which
was [in the past] the most Jewish Jewry in the world, became the least
Jewish.2884 The current state of Soviet society is fraught with destruction of
Jewish spiritual and intellectual potential.2885 Or as another author put it: the
Jews in the Soviet Union were neither allowed to assimilate, nor were they
allowed to be Jews.2886
Yet Jewish identity was never subdued during the entire Soviet period.
In 1966 the official mouthpiece Sovetish Heymland claimed that even
assimilated Russian-speaking Jews still retain their unique character, distinct
from that of any other segment of population.2887 Not to mention the Jews of
Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkov, who sometimes were even snooty about their
Jewishness to the extent that they did not want to befriend a goy.2888
Scientist Leo Tumerman ( already in Israel in 1977) recalls the early Soviet
period, when he used to reject any nationalism. Yet now, looking back at
those years: I am surprised to notice what I had overlooked then: despite what
appeared to be my full assimilation into the Russian life, the entire circle of my
close and intimate friends at that time was Jewish.2889
The sincerity of his statement is certain the picture is clear. Such things
were widespread and I witnessed similar situations quite a few times, and
Russians people did not mind such behavior at all.
Another Jewish author notes: in the USSR non-religious Jews of all walks
of life hand in hand defended the principle of `racial purity. He adds:
Nothing could be more natural. People for whom the Jewishness is just an
empty word are very rare, especially among the unassimilated [Jews].2890
Natan Sharanskys testimonial, given shortly after his immigration to Israel,
is also typical: Much of my Jewishness was instilled into me by my family.
Although our family was an assimilated one, it nevertheless was Jewish. My
father, an ordinary Soviet journalist, was so fascinated with the revolutionary
ideas of `happiness for all and not just for the Jews, that he became an
2882, . 8, . 262, 264.
2883 , . 295, 302.
2884. . : [ . ] // , -, 1977,
24, . 120.
2885. -. :
[] // 22, 1978, 3, . 175.
2886. . : [] // 22, 1984, 38, . 135.
2887. . // -2, . 379.
2888. . : [] // 22, 1981, 21, . 127.
288922*, 1978, 1, . 204.
2890. . // 22, 1987, 52, . 112.
absolutely loyal Soviet citizen. Yet in 1967 after the Six-Day War and later in
1968 after Czechoslovakia, I suddenly realized an obvious difference between
myself and non-Jews around me a kind of a sense of the fundamental
difference between my Jewish consciousness and the national consciousness of
the Russians.2891
And here is another very thoughtful testimonial (1975): The efforts spent
over the last hundred years by Jewish intellectuals to reincarnate themselves
into the Russian national form were truly titanic. Yet it did not give them
balance of mind; on the contrary, it rather made them to feel the bitterness of
their bi-national existence more acutely. And they have an answer to the tragic
question of Aleksandr Blok: `My Russia, my life, are we to drudge through life
together? To that question, to which a Russian as a rule gives an unambiguous
answer, a member of Russian-Jewish intelligentsia used to reply (sometimes
after self-reflection): `No, not together. For the time being, yes, side by side, but
not together A duty is no substitute for Motherland. And so the Jews felt
free from obligations at all sharp turns of Russian history.2892
Fair enough. One can only hope for all Russian Jews to get such clarity and
acknowledge this dilemma.
Yet usually the problem in its entirety is blamed on anti-Semitism:
Excluding us from everything genuinely Russian, their anti-Semitism
simultaneously barred us from all things Jewish . Anti-Semitism is terrible
not because of what it does to the Jews (by imposing restrictions on them), but
because of what it does with the Jews by turning them into neurotic, depressed,
stressed, and defective human beings.2893
Still, those Jews, who had fully woken up to their identity, were very
quickly, completely, and reliably cured from such a morbid condition.
Jewish identity in the Soviet Union grew stronger as they went through the
historical ordeals predestined for Jewry by the 20th Century. First, it was the
Jewish Catastrophe during the Second World War. (Through the efforts of
official Soviet muffling and obscuring, Soviet Jewry only comprehended its full
scope later.)
Another push was given by the campaign against cosmopolitans in 1949-
1950.
Then there was a very serious threat of a massacre by Stalin, eliminated by
his timely death.
And with Khrushchevs thaw and after it, later in the 1960s, Soviet Jewry
quickly awoke spiritually, already sensing its unique identity.
During the second half of the 1950s, the growing sense of bitterness,
spread over large segments of Soviet Jewry, lead to consolidation of the sense
of national solidarity.2894

2891. . [] // 22, 1986, 49. . 111-112.

2892. . // , -, 1975, 1, . 129, 132-133.
2893. . // 22, 1985, 40, . 133, 134.
2894. . , . 415.
 But only in the late 1960s did a very small but committed group of
scientists (note, they were not humanitarians; the most colorful figure among
them was Alexander Voronel) begin rebuilding of Jewish national consciousness
in Russia.2895
And then against the nascent national consciousness of Soviet Jews, the
Six-Day War suddenly broke out and instantly ended in what might have
seemed a miraculous victory. Israel has ascended in their minds and Soviet Jews
awoke to their spiritual and consanguineous kinship [with Israel].
But the Soviet authorities, furious at Nassers disgraceful defeat,
immediately attacked Soviet Jews with the thundering campaign against the
Judeo-Zionist-Fascism, insinuating that all the Jews were Zionists and
claiming that the global conspiracy of Zionism is the expected and
inevitable product of the entirety of Jewish history, Jewish religion, and the
resultant Jewish national character and because of the consistent pursuit of
the ideology of racial supremacy and apartheid, Judaism turned out to be a very
convenient religion for securing world dominance.2896
The campaign on TV and in the press was accompanied by a dramatic
break of diplomatic relations with Israel. The Soviet Jews had many reasons to
fear: It looked like it was going to come to calls for a pogrom.2897
But underneath this scare a new and already unstoppable explosion of
Jewish national consciousness was growing and developing.
Bitterness, resentment, anger, and the sense of social insecurity were
accruing for a final break up which would lead to complete severing of all ties
with [this] country and [this] society to emigration.2898
The victory of the Israeli Army contributed to the awakening of national
consciousness among the many thousands of almost completely assimilated
Soviet Jews . The process of national revival has began . The activity of
Zionist groups in cities all across the country surged . In 1969, there were
attempts to create a united Zionist Organization [in the USSR] . An
increasing number of Jews applied to emigrate to Israel.2899
And the numerous refusals to grant exit visas led to the failed attempt to
hijack an airplane on June 15, 1970. The following Dymshits-Kuznetsov
hijacking affair can be considered a historic landmark in the fate of Soviet
Jewry.

2895. . // , -. 1976, 12. .

133-134.
2896. . : [] // 22,
1978, 3, . 144.
2897. . // , 1989, 1, . 67.
2898 .
2899, . 8. . 267.
 Chapter 24. Breaking away from Bolshevism

At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe imagined itself to be on the

threshold of worldwide enlightenment. No one could have predicted the
strength with which nationalism would explode in that very century among all
nations of the world. One hundred years later it seems nationalist feelings are
not about to die soon (the very message that international socialists have been
trying to drum into our heads for the whole century), but instead are gaining
strength.
Yet, does not the multi-national nature of humanity provide variety and
wealth? Erosion of nations surely would be an impoverishment for humanity,
the entropy of the spirit. (And centuries of the histories of national cultures
would then turn into irredeemably dead and useless antics.) The logic that it
would be easier to manage such a uniform mankind fails by its petty
reductionism.
However, the propaganda in the Soviet empire harped non-stop in an
importunately-triumphant manner about the imminent withering away and
amalgamation of nations, proclaiming that no national question exists in our
country, and that there is certainly no Jewish question.
Yet why should not the Jewish question exist the question of the
unprecedented three-thousand-year-old existence of the nation, scattered all
over the Earth, yet spiritulally soldered together despite all notions of the state
and territoriality, and at the same time influencing the entire world history in the
most lively and powerful way? Why should there not be a Jewish question
given that all national questions come up at one time or other, even the Gagauz
question [a small Christian Turkic people, who live in the Balkans and Eastern
Europe]?
Of course, no such silly doubt could ever arise, if the Jewish question were
not the focus of many different political games.
The same was true for Russia too. In pre-revolutionary Russian society, as
we saw, it was the omission of the Jewish question that was considered anti-
Semitic. In fact, in the mind of the Russian public the Jewish question
understood as the question of civil rights or civil equality developed into
perhaps the central question of the whole Russian public life of that period, and
certainly into the central node of the conscience of every individual, its acid
test.
 With the growth of European socialism, all national issues were
increasingly recognized as merely regrettable obstacles to that great doctrine; all
the more was the Jewish question (directly attributed to capitalism by Marx)
considered a bloated hindrance. Mommsen wrote that in the circles of
Western-Russian socialist Jewry, as he put it, even the slightest attempt to
discuss the Jewish question was branded as reactionary and anti-Semitic
(this was even before the Bund).
Such was the iron standard of socialism inherited by the USSR. From 1918
the communists forbade (under threat of imprisonment or death) any separate
treatment or consideration of the Jewish question (except sympathy for their
suffering under the Tsars and positive attitudes for their active role in
communism). The intellectual class voluntarily and willingly adhered to the
new canon while others were required to follow it.
This cast of thought persisted even through the Soviet-German war as if,
even then, there was not any particular Jewish question. And even up to the
demise of the USSR under Gorbachev, the authorities used to repeat hard-
headedly: no, there is no Jewish question, no, no, no! (It was replaced by the
Zionist question.)
Yet already by the end of the World War II, when the extent of the
destruction of the Jews under Hitler had dawned on the Soviet Jews, and then
through Stalins anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late 1940s, the Soviet
intelligentsia realized that the Jewish question in the USSR does exist! And the
pre-revolutionary understanding that it is central to Russian society and to
the conscience of every individual and that it is the true measure of
humanity2900 was also restored.
In the West it was only the leaders of Zionism who confidently talked from
the late 19th century about the historical uniqueness and everlasting relevance
of the Jewish question (and some of them at the same time maintained robust
links with diehard European socialism).
And then the emergence of the state of Israel and the consequent storms around
it added to the confusion of naive socialist minds of Europeans.
Here I offer two small but at the time quite stirring and typical examples. In
one episode of so-called the dialogue between the East and the West show (a
clever Cold-War-period programme, where Western debaters were opposed by
Eastern-European officials or novices who played off official nonsense for their
own sincere convictions) in the beginning of 1967, a Slovak writer, Ladislav
Mnacko, properly representing the socialist East, wittily noted that he never in
his life had any conflict with the Communist authorities, except one case when
his drivers license was suspended for a traffic violation. His French opponent
angrily said that at least in one other case, surely Mnacko should be in the
opposition: when the uprising in neighboring Hungary was drowned in blood.
But no, the suppression of Hungarian Uprising neither violated the peace of
Mnackos mind, nor did it force him to say anything sharp or impudent. Then, a
2900. . . : , 1988. . 1, . 24.
few months passed after the dialogue and the Six-Day War broke out. At that
point the Czechoslovak Government of Novotny, all loyal Communists, accused
Israel of aggression and severed diplomatic relations with it. And what
happened next? Mnacko a Slovak married to a Jew who had calmly
disregarded the suppression of Hungary before, now was so outraged and
agitated that he left his homeland and as a protest went to live in Israel.
The second example comes from the same year. A famous French socialist,
Daniel Meyer, at the moment of the Six-Day War had written in Le Monde, that
henceforth he is: 1) ashamed to be a socialist because of the fact that the
Soviet Union calls itself a socialist country (well, when the Soviet Union was
exterminating not only its own people but also other socialists he was not
ashamed); 2) ashamed of being a French (obviously due to the wrong political
position of de Gaulle); and, 3) ashamed to be a human (wasnt that too much?),
and ashamed of all except being a Jew.2901
We are ready to accept both Mnackos outrage and Meyers anger, yet we
would like to point out at the extreme intensity of their feelings given the
long history of their obsequious condoning of communism. Surely, the intensity
of their feelings is also an aspect of the Jewish question in the 20th century.
So in what way did the Jewish question not exist?
If one listened to American radio broadcasts aimed at the Soviet Union
from 1950 to the 1980s, one might conclude that there was no other issue in the
Soviet Union as important as the Jewish question. (At the same time in the
United States, where the Jews can be described as the most privileged
minority and where they gained an unprecedented status, the majority of
[American Jews] still claimed that hatred and discrimination by their Christian
compatriots was a grim fact of the modern life; 2902 yet because it would sound
incredible if stated aloud, then the Jewish question does not exist, and to notice
it and talk about it is unnecessary and improper.)
We have to get used to talking about Jewish question not in a hush and
fearfully, but clearly, articulately and firmly. We should do so not overflowing
with passion, but sympathetically aware of both the unusual and difficult Jewish
world history and centuries of our Russian history that are also full of
significant suffering. Then the mutual prejudices, sometimes very intense,
would disappear and calm reason would reign.
Working on this book, I cant help but notice that the Jewish question has
been omnipresent in world history and it never was a national question in the
narrow sense like all other national questions, but was always maybe
because of the nature of Judaism? interwoven into something much bigger.

2901Daniel Mayer. Jai honte detre socialist // Le Monde, 1967, 6 Juin, p. 3.

2902Michael Medved. The Jewish Question // National Review, 1997, July 28, p. 53.
When in the late 1960s I mused about the fate of the communist regime and felt
that yes, it is doomed, my impression was strongly supported by the observation
that so many Jews had already abandoned it.
There was a period when they persistently and in unison supported the
Soviet regime, and at that time the future definitely belonged to it. Yet now the
Jews started to defect from it, first the thinking individuals and later the Jewish
masses. Was this not a sure sign that the years of the Soviet rule are numbered?
Yes, it was.
So when exactly did it happen that the Jews, once such a reliable backbone
of the regime, turned into almost its greatest adversary?
Can we say that the Jews always struggled for freedom? No, for too many
of them were the most zealous communists. Yet now they turned their backs on
it. And without them, the ageing Bolshevist fanaticism had not only lost some
of its fervor, it actually ceased to be fanatical at all, rather it became lazy in the
Russian way.
After the Soviet-German War, the Jews became disappointed by
Communist power: it turned out that they were worse off than before. We saw
the main stages of this split. Initially, the support of the newborn state of Israel
by the USSR had inspired the Soviet Jews. Then came the persecution of the
cosmopolitans and the mainly Jewish intelligentsia (not the philistine masses
yet) began to worry: communism pushes the Jews aside? oppresses them? The
terrible threat of massacre by Stalin overwhelmed them as well but it was
short-lived and miraculously disappeared very soon. During the interregnum,
[following Stalins death] and then under Khrushchev, Jewish hopes were
replaced by dissatisfaction and the promised stable improvement failed to
materialize.
And then the Six-Day War broke out with truly biblical force, rocking both
Soviet and world Jewry, and the Jewish national consciousness began to grow
like an avalanche. After the Six-Day War, much was changed the action
acquired momentum. Letters and petitions began to flood Soviet and
international organizations. National life was revived: during the holidays it
became difficult to get into a synagogue, underground societies sprang up to
study Jewish history, culture and Hebrew.2903
And then there was that rising campaign against Zionism, already linked
to imperialism, and so the resentment grew among the Jews toward that
increasingly alien and abominable and dull Bolshevism where did such a
monster come from?
Indeed, for many educated Jews the departure from communism was
painful as it is always difficult to part with an ideal after all, was not it a
great, and perhaps inevitable, planetary experiment initiated in Russia in 1917;
an experiment, based on ancient attractive and obviously high ideas, not all of

2903 . ( ). : , 1978, .
174.
which were faulty and many still retain their beneficial effect to this day.
Marxism requires educated minds.2904
Many Jewish political writers strongly favored the term Stalinism a
convenient form to justify the earlier Soviet regime. It is difficult to part with
the old familiar and sweet things, if it is really possible at all.
There have been attempts to increase the influence of intellectuals on the
ruling elite. Such was the Letter to the XXIII Congress (of the Communist
Party) by G. Pomerants (1966). The letter asked the Communist Party to trust
the scientific and creative intelligentsia, that desires not anarchy but the rule
of law that wants not to destroy the existing system but to make it more
flexible, more rational, more humane and proposed to establish an advisory
think tank, which would generally consult the executive leadership of the
country.2905
The offer remained unanswered.
And many souls long ached for such a wasted opportunity with such a
glorious past.
But there was no longer any choice . And so the Soviet Jews split away
from communism. And now, while deserting it, they turned against it. And that
was such a perfect opportunity they could themselves, with expurgatory
repentance, acknowledge their formerly active and cruel role in the triumph of
communism in Russia.
Yet almost none of them did (I discuss the few exceptions below). The
above-mentioned collection of essays, Russia and the Jews, so heartfelt, so
much needed and so timely when published in 1924 was fiercely denounced by
Jewry. And even today, according to the opinion of the erudite scholar, Shimon
Markish: these days, nobody dares to defend those hook-nosed and burry
commissars because of fear of being branded pro-Soviet, a Chekist, a God-
knows-what else. Yet let me say in no uncertain terms: the behavior of those
Jewish youths who joined the Reds is a thousand times more understandable
than the reasons of the authors of that collection of works.2906
Still, some Jewish authors began to recognize certain things of the past as
they really were, though in the most cautious terms: It was the end of the role
of the `Russian-Jewish intelligentsia that developed in the prewar and early
postwar years and that was to some degree sincerely a bearer of Marxist
ideology and that professed, however timidly and implicitly and contrary to
actual practice, the ideals of liberalism, internationalism and humanism. 2907 A
bearer of Marxist ideology? Yes, of course. The ideals of internationalism?

2904. // , 24 1987, . 12.

2905. . XXIII // . Frankfurt/Main:
, 1972, . 269-276.
2906. . // 22: -
. -,
1980, 16, . 188.
2907. . : [] // 22,
1978, 3, . 147.
 Sure. Yet liberalism and humanism? True, but only after Stalins death,
while coming to senses.
However, very different things can be inferred from the writings of the
majority of Jewish publicists in the late Soviet Union. Looking back to the very
year of 1917, they find that under communism there was nothing but Jewish
suffering! Among the many nationalities of the Soviet Union, the Jews have
always been stigmatized as the least `reliable element.2908
What incredibly short memory one should have to state such things in
1983? Always! And what about the 1920s? And the 1930s? To assert that they
were then considered the least reliable?! Is it really possible to forget everything
so completely?
If one takes a birds-eye view of the entire history of the Soviet era,
then the latter appears as one gradual process of destruction of the Jews. Note
the entire history! We investigated this in the previous chapters and saw that
even without taking into account Jewish over-representation in the top Soviet
circles, there had been a period of well-being for many Jews with mass
migration to cities, open access to higher education and the blossoming of
Jewish culture. The author proceeds with a reservation: Although there were
certain `fluctuations, the overall trend continued Soviet power,
destroying all nationalities, generally dealt with the Jews in the most brutal
way.2909
Another author considers a disaster even the early period when Lenin and
the Communist Party called upon the Jews to help with state governance, and
the call was heard, and the great masses of Jews from the shtetls of the hated
Pale moved into the capital and the big cities, closer to the avant-garde [of the
Revolution]; he states that the formation of the Bolshevik regime that had
turned the greater part of Jews into `dclass, impoverished and exiled them
and destroyed their families was a catastrophe for the majority of the Jewish
population. (Well, that depends on onespoint of view. And the author himself
later notes: in the 1920s and 1930s, the children of dclass Jewish petty
bourgeois were able to graduate from the technical institutes and
metropolitan universities and to become `commanders of the `great
developments.) Then his reasoning becomes vague: in the beginning of the
century the main feature of Jewish activity was a fascination with the idea
of building a new fair society yet the army of revolution consisted of plain
rabble all those `who were nothing, [a quote from The Internationale].
Then, after the consolidation of the regime that rabble decided to implement
their motto and to `become all [also a quote from The Internationale], and
finished off their own leaders. And so the kingdom of rabble unlimited
totalitarianism was established. (And, in this context, the Jews had nothing
to do with it, except that they were among the victimized leaders.) And the

2908. . // 22. 1983, 31, . 145.

2909. . : [] // 22, 1984, 38,
. 130.
purge continued for four decades until the mid-1950s; then the last bitter
pill according to the scenario of disappointments was prescribd to the
remaining `charmed Jews.2910 Again we see the same angle: the entire Soviet
history was one of unending oppression and exclusion of the Jews.
Yet now they wail in protest in unison: We did not elect this regime!
Or even it is not possible to cultivate a loyal Soviet elite among them [the
Jews].2911
Oh my God, was not this method working flawlessly for 30 years, and only later
coming undone? So where did all those glorious and famous names whom
weve seen in such numbers came from?
And why were their eyes kept so tightly shut that they couldnt see the
essence of Soviet rule for thirty to forty years? How is that that their eyes were
opened only now? And what opened them?
Well, it was mostly because of the fact that now that power had suddenly
turned around and began pushing the Jews not only out of its ruling and
administrative circles, but out of cultural and scientific establishements also.
The disappointment was so fresh and sore, that we did not have the strength,
nor the courage to tell even our children about it. And what about the children?
For the great majority of them the main motivation was the same graduate
school, career, and so on.2912
Yet soon they would have to examine their situation more closely.

In the 1970s we see examples of rather amazing agreement of opinions,

unthinkable for the past half a century.
For instance, Shulgin wrote in 1929: We must acknowledge our past. The
flat denial claiming that the Jews are to blame for nothing neither for the
Russian Revolution, nor for the consolidation of Bolshevism, nor for the horrors
of the communism is the worst way possible. It would be a great step
forward if this groundless tendency to blame all the troubles of Russia on the
Jews could be somewhat differentiated. It would be already great if any
`contrasts could be found.2913
Fortunately, such contrasts, and even more comprehension, and even
remorse were voiced by some Jews. And, combined with the honest mind
and rich life experience, they were quite clear. And this brings hope.
Heres Dan Levin, an American intellectual who immigrated to Israel: It is
no accident, that none of the American writers who attempted to describe and
explain what happened to Soviet Jewry, has touched this important issue the
[Jewish] responsibility for the communism. In Russia, the peoples anti-
2910. . // 22, 1980. 16, . 169-174.
2911. . // 22, 1984, 38, . 130.
2912. . // 22, 1980. 16. . 175.
2913.. . : . ,
1929, .49-50.
Semitism is largely due to the fact that the Russians perceive the Jews as the
cause of all the evil of the revolution. Yet American writers Jews and ex-
Communists do not want to resurrect the ghosts of the past. However,
oblivion is a terrible thing.2914
Simultaneously, another Jewish writer, an migr from the Soviet Union,
published: the experience of the Russian (Soviet) Jewry, in contrast to that of
the European Jewry, whose historical background is the experience of a
collision with the forces of outer evil requires a look not from inside out but
rather of introspection and inner self-examination. In this reality we saw
only one Jewish spirituality that of the Commissar and its name was
Marxism. Or he writes about our young Zionists who demonstrate so much
contempt toward Russia, her rudeness and savagery, contrasting all this with
[the worthiness of] the ancient Jewish nation. I saw pretty clearly, that those
who today sing hosanna to Jewry, glorifying it in its entiriety (without the
slightest sense of guilt or the slightest potential to look inside), yesterday were
saying: I wouldnt be against the Soviet regime, if it was not anti-Semitic, and
two days ago they beat their breasts in ecstasy: `Long live the great brotherhood
of nations! Eternal Glory to the Father and Friend, the genius Comrade Stalin!
2915
But today, when it is clear how many Jews were in the iron Bolshevik
leadership, and how many more took part in the ideological guidance of a great
country to the wrong track should the question not arise [among modern
Jews] as to some sense of responsibility for the actions of those [Jews]? It
should be asked in general: shouldnt there be a kind of moral responsibility
not a joint liability, yet the responsibility to remember and to acknowledge? For
example, modern Germans accept liability to Jews directly, both morally and
materially, as perpetrators are liable to the victims: for many years they have
paid compensation to Israel and personal compensation to surviving victims.
So what about Jews? When Mikhail Kheifets, whom I repeatedly cite in
this work, after having been through labor camps, expressed the grandeur of his
character by repenting on behalf of his people for the evil committed by the
Jews in the Soviet Union in the name of communism he was bitterly
ridiculed.
The whole educated society, the cultured circle, had genuinely failed to
notice any Russian grievances in the 1920s and 1930s; they didnt even assume
that such could exist yet they instantly recognized the Jewish grievances as
soon as those emerged. Take, for example, Victor Perelman, who after
emigrating published an anti-Soviet Jewish journal Epoch and We and who
served the regime in the filthiest place, in Chakovskys Literaturnaya Gazeta
until the Jewish question had entered his life. Then he opted out.

2914 . : [] // 22, 1978, 1, . 55.

2915. . //
. ---, 1977, 123, . 43-46.
 At a higher level, they generalized it as the crash of illusions about the
integration [of Jewry] into the Russian social movements, about making any
change in Russia.2916
Thus, as soon as the Jews recognized their explicit antagonism to the
Soviet regime, they turned into its intellectual opposition in accord to their
social role. Of course, it was not them who rioted in Novocherkassk, or created
unrest in Krasnodar, Alexandrov, Murom, or Kostroma. Yet the filmmaker
Mikhail Romm plucked up his heart and, during a public speech,
unambiguously denounced the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and that
became one of the first Samizdat documents (and Romm himself, who in so
timely a manner rid himself of his ideological impediments, became a kind of
spiritual leader for the Soviet Jewry, despite his films Lenin in October (1937),
Lenin in 1918 (1939), and despite being a fivefold winner of the Stalin Prize).
And after that the Jews had become reliable supporters and intrepid members of
the democratic and dissident movements.
Looking back from Israel at the din of Moscow, another witness reflected:
A large part of Russian democrats (if not the majority) are of Jewish origin.
Yet they do not identify [themselves] as Jews and do not realize that their
audience is also mostly Jewish.2917
And so the Jews had once again become the Russian revolutionaries,
shouldering the social duty of the Russian intelligentsia, which the Jewish
Bolsheviks so zealously helped to exterminate during the first decade after the
revolution; they had become the true and genuine nucleus of the new public
opposition. And so yet again no progressive movement was possible without
Jews.
Who had halted the torrent of false political (and often semi-closed) court
trials? Alexander Ginzburg, and then Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz did. I
would not exaggerate if I claim that their appeal To world public opinion in
January 1968, delivered not through unreliable Samizdat, but handed fearlessly
to the West in front of Cheka cameras, had been a milestone of Soviet
ideological history. Who were those seven brave souls who dragged their leaden
feet to Lobnoye Mesto [a stone platform in Red Square] on Aug. 25, 1968?
They did it not for the greater success of their protest, but to wash the name of
Russia from the Czechoslovak disgrace by their sacrifice. Four out of the seven
were Jews. (Remember, that the percentage of Jews in the population of the
country then was less than 1%) We should also remember Semyon Gluzman,
who sacrificed his freedom in the struggle against the nuthouses [dissidents
were sometimes incarcerated in psychiatric clinics]. Many Jewish intellectuals
from Moscow were among the first punished by the Soviet regime.
Yet very few dissidents ever regretted the past of their Jewish fathers. P.
Litvinov never mentioned his grandfathers role in Soviet propaganda. Neither
would we hear from V. Belotserkovsky how many innocents were slaughtered

2916. . : [ ] // 22 . 1982, 24, . 112.

2917. . // 22, 1978, 2, . 186.
by his Mauser-toting father. Communist Raisa Lert, who became a dissident late
in life, was proud of her membership in that party even after The Gulag
Archipelago; the party she had joined in good faith and enthusiastically in her
youth; the party to which she had wholly devoted herself and from which she
herself had suffered, yet nowadays it is not the same party anymore. 2918
Apparenty she did not realize how appealing the early Soviet terror was for her.
After the events of 1968, Sakharov joined the dissident movement without
a backward glance. Among his new dissident preoccupations were many
individual cases; in particular, personal cases of Jewish refuseniks [those,
overwhelming Jewish, dissidents who requested, but were refused the right to
emigrate from the Soviet Union]. Yet when he tried to expand the business (as
he had innocently confided to me, not realizing all the glaring significance of
what he said), Gelfand, a member of the Academy of Science, told him that we
are tired of helping these people to resolve their problems, while another
member, Zeldovich, said: Im not going to sign any petition on behalf of
victims of any injustice I want to retain the ability to protect those who suffer
for their nationality. Which means to protect the Jews only.
There was also a purely Jewish dissident movement, which was concerned
only with the oppression of the Jews and Jewish emigration from the Soviet
Union (more about it later).

A trasformation in public consciousness often pushes forward outstanding

individuals as representatives, symbols and spokesmen of the age. So in the
1960s Alexander Galich became such a typical and accurate representative of
the processes and attitudes in the Soviet intellectual circles. (`Galich is a pen
name, explains N. Rubinstein. It is made of syllables of his real name
Ginsburg Alexander Arkadievich. Choosing a pen name is a serious thing.2919
Actually, I assume that the author was aware that, apart from being just a
combination of syllables, Galich is also the name of the ancient Russian city
from the very heart of Slavic history.) Galich enjoyed the general support of
Soviet intelligentsia; tape recordings of his guitar performances were widely
disseminated; and they have almost become the symbol of the social revival of
the 1960s expressing it powerfully and vehemently. The opinion of the cultural
circle was unanimous: the most popular peoples poet, the bard of modern
Russia.
Galich was 22 when the Soviet-German War broke out. He says that he was
exempt from military service because of poor health; he then moved to Grozny,
where he unexpectedly easily became the head of the literature section of the
2918. . // : , , . , 1980,
6, . 5-6.
2919. . // (
): . -,
1975, 2, . 164.
local Drama Theatre; he also organized a theater of political satire; then he
evacuated through Krasnovodsk to Chirchik near Tashkent; in 1942, he moved
from there to Moscow with a front-line theatrical company under formation and
spent the rest of the war with that company.
He recalled how he worked on hospital trains, composing and performing
couplets for wounded soldiers; how they were drinking spirits with a
trainmaster. All of us, each in his own way, worked for the great common
cause: we were defending our Motherland.2920 After the war he became a well-
known Soviet scriptwriter (he worked on many movies) and a playwright (ten of
his plays were staged by many theaters in the Soviet Union and abroad [216]
[references in square brackets refer to the page number in the source 21]. All
that was in 1940s and 1950s, in the age of general spiritual stagnation well,
he could not step out of the line, could he? He even made a movie about
Chekists, and was awarded for his work.
Yet in the early 1960s, Galich abruptly changed his life. He found courage
to forsake his successful and well-off life and walk into the square. [98] It
was after that that he began performing guitar-accompanied songs to people
gathering in private Moscow apartments. He gave up open publishing, though it
was, of course, not easy: [it was great] to read a name on the cover, not just
someone elses, but mine! [216]
Surely, his anti-regime songs, keen, acidic, and and morally demanding,
were of benefit to the society, further destabilizing public attitudes.
In his songs he mainly addressed Stalins later years and beyond; he usually
did not deplore the radiant past of the age of Lenin (except one instance: The
carts with bloody cargo / squeak by Nikitsky Gate [224]). At his best, he calls
the society to moral cleansing, to resistance (Gold-diggers waltz [26], I
choose liberty [226], Ballad of the clean hands [181], Our fingers blotted
from the questionnaires [90], Every day silent trumpets glorify thoughtful
vacuity [92]). Sometimes he sang the hard truth about the past (In vain had
our infantry perished in 1943, to no avail [21]), sometimes Red myths,
singing about poor persecuted communists (There was a time almost a third
of the inmates came from the Central Committee, / There was a time when for
the red color / they added ten years [to the sentence]![69]). Once he touched
dekulakization (Disenfranchised ones were summoned in first [115]). Yet his
main blow was against the current establishment (There are fences in the
country; behind fences live the leaders [13]). He was justly harsh there;
however, he oversimplified the charge by attacking their privileged way of life
only: here they eat, drink, rejoice [151-152]. The songs were embittering, but in
a narrow-minded way, almost like the primitive Red proletarian propaganda
of the past. Yet when he was switching his focus from the leaders to the

2920 . . . . . . . :
-, 1998 ( ), . 552, 556, 561-562.
; .
people, his characters were almost entirely boobies, fastidious men, rabble and
rascals a very limited selection.
He had found a precise point of perspective for himself, perfectly in accord
with the spirit of the time: he impersonalized himself with all those people who
were suffering, persecuted and killed (I was a GI and as a GI Ill die [248],
We, GIs, are dying in battle). Yet with his many songs narrated from the first
person of a former camp inmate, he made a strong impression that he was an
inmate himself (And that other inmate was me myself [87]; I froze like a
horseshoe in a sleigh trail / Into ice that I picked with a hammer pick / After all,
wasnt it me who spent twenty years / In those camps [24]; as the numbers
[personal inmate number tattooed on the arm] / we died, we died; from the
camp we were sent right to the front![69]). Many believed that he was a former
camp inmate and they have tried to find from Galich when and where he had
been in camps.2921
So how did he address his past, his longstanding participation in the
stupefying official Soviet lies? Thats what had struck me the most: singing with
such accusatory pathos, he had never expressed a single word of his personal
remorse, not a word of personal repentance, nowhere! Didnt he realize that
when he sang: Oh Partys Iliad! What a giftwrapped groveling! [216], he sang
about himself? And when he crooned: If you sell the unction [40], as though
referring to somebody else, did it occur to him that he himself was selling
unction for half of his life. Why on earth would he not renounce his pro-
official plays and films? No! We did not sing glory to executioners! [119] Yet,
as the matter of fact, they did. Perhaps he did realize it or he gradually came to
the realization, because later, no longer in Russia, he said: I was a well-off
screenwriter and playwright and a well-off Soviet flunky. And I have realized
that I could no longer go on like that. Finally, I have to speak loudly, speak the
truth [639].
But then, in the sixties, he intrepidly turned the pathos of the civil rage, for
instance, to the refutation of the Gospel commandments (do not judge, lest ye
be judged): No, I have contempt for the very essence / Of this formula of
existence! And then, relying on the sung miseries, he confidently tried on a
prosecutors robe: I was not elected. But I am the judge! [100] And so he
grew so confident, that in the lengthy Poem about Stalin (The Legend of
Christmas), where he in bad taste imagined Stalin as Christ, and presented the
key formula of his agnostic mindset his really famous, the clichd -quotes,
and so harmful lines: Dont be afraid of fire and hell, / And fear only him /
Who says: `I know the right way! [325].
But Christ did teach us the right way. What we see here in Galichs
words is just boundless intellectual anarchism that muzzles any clear idea, any
resolute offer. Well, we can always run as a thoughtless (but pluralistic) herd,
and probably well get somewhere.

2921. . // , . 632.
 Yet the most heartrending and ubiquitous keynote in his lyrics was the
sense of Jewish identity and Jewish pain (Our train leaves for Auschwitz today
and daily). Other good examples include the poems By the rivers of Babylon
and Kadish. (Or take this: My six-pointed star, burn it on my sleeve and on my
chest. Similar lyrical and passionate tones can be found in the The memory of
Odessa (I wanted to unite Mandelstam and Chagall). Your kinsman and your
cast-off / Your last singer of the Exodus as he addressed the departing
Jews.)
The Jewish memory imbued him so deeply that even in his non-Jewish
lyrics he casually added expressions such as: Not a hook-nosed; not a Tatar,
not a Yid [115, 117]; you are still not in Israel, dodderer? [294]; and even
Arina Rodionovna [Pushkins nanny, immortalized by the poet in his works]
lulls him in Yiddish [101]. Yet he doesnt mention a single prosperous or non-
oppressed Jew, a well-off Jew on a good position, for instance, in a research
institute, editorial board, or in commerce such characters didnt even make a
passing appearance in his poems. A Jew is always either humiliated, or
suffering, or imprisoned and dying in a camp. Take his famous lines: You are
not to be chamberlains, the Jews / Neither the Synod, nor the Senate is for
you / You belong in Solovki and Butyrki [the latter two being political prisons]
[40].
What a short memory they have not only Galich, but his whole audience
who were sincerely, heartily taking in these sentimental lines! What about those
twenty years, when Soviet Jewry was not nearly in the Solovki, when so many
of them did parade as chamberlains and in the Senate!?
They have forgotten it. They have sincerely and completely forgotten it.
Indeed, it is so difficult to remember bad things about yourself.
And inasmuch as among the successful people milking the regime there
were supposedly no Jews left, but only Russians, Galichs satire, unconsciously
or consciously, hit the Russians, all those Klim Petroviches and Paramonovs; all
that social anger invoked by his songs targeted them, through the stressed
russopyaty [derogatory term for Russians] images and details, presenting
them as informers, prison guards, profligates, fools or drunks. Sometimes it was
more like a caricature, sometimes more of a contemptuous pity (which we often
indeed deserve, unfortunately): Greasy long hair hanging down, / The guest
started Yermak [a song about the cossack leader and Russian folk hero] he
cackles like a cock / Enough to make a preacher swear / And he wants to chat /
About the salvation of Russia [117-118]. Thus he pictured the Russians as
always drunk, not distinguishing kerosene from vodka, not interested in
anything except drinking, idle, or simply lost, or foolish individuals.Yet he was
considered a folk poet. And he didnt image a single Russian hero-soldier,
workman, or intellectual, not even a single decent camp inmate (he assigned the
role of the main camp inmate to himself), because, you know, all those prison-
guard seed [118] camp bosses are Russians. And here he wrote about Russia
directly: Every liar is a Messiah! / <> And just dare you to ask / Brothers,
had there even been / Any Rus in Russia? It is abrim with filth. And
then, desperately: But somewhere, perhaps, / She does exist!? That invisible
Russia, where under the tender skies / Everyone shares / Gods word and
bread. I pray thee: / Hold on! / Be alive in decay, / So in the heart, as in
Kitezh, / I could hear your bells! [280-281]
So, with the new opportunity and the lure of emigration, Galich was torn
between the submerged legendary Kitezh [legendary Russian invisble city] and
todays filth: Its the same vicious circle, the same old story, the ring, which
cannot be either closed, or open! [599]. He left with the words: I, a Russian
poet, cannot be separated from Russia by `the fifth article [the requirement in
the Soviet internal passport nationality]! [588]
Yet some other departing Jews drew from his songs a seed of aversion and
contempt for Russia, or at least, the confidence that it is right to break away
from her. Heed a voice from Israel: We said goodbye to Russia. Not without
pain, but forever. Russia still holds us tenaciously. But in a year, ten years,
a hundred years well escape from her and find our own home. Listening to
Galich, we once again recognize that it is the right way.2922

2922. . // , -,
1975, 2, . 177.
 Chapter 25. Accusing Russia

The Jewish break from the Soviet communism was doubtless a movement of
historical significance.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the fusion of the Soviet Jewry and Bolshevism
seemed permanent. Then suddenly, they diverge? What a joy!
Of course, as is always true for both individuals and nations, it is
unreasonable to expect words of remorse from Jews regarding their past
involvement. But I absolutely could not expect that the Jews, while deserting
Bolshevism, rather than expressing even a sign of repentance or at least some
embarrassment, instead angrily turned on the Russian people: it is the Russians
who had ruined democracy in Russia (i.e., in February 1917), it is the Russians
who are guilty of support of this regime from 1918 on.
Sure, they claim, it is we (the Russian people) who are the guilty! Actually,
it was earlier than 1918 the dirty scenes of the radiant February Revolution
were tale-telling. Yet the neophyte anti-communists were uncompromising
from now on everyone must accept that they have always fought against this
regime, and no one should recall that it used to be their favorite and should not
mention how well they had once served this tyranny. Because it was the
natives who created, nurtured and cared for it:
The leaders of the October Coup were the followers rather than the
leaders. [Really? The New Iron Party was made up of the followers?] They
simply voiced the dormant wishes of the masses and worked to implement
them. They did not break with the grassroots. The October coup was a
disaster for Russia. The country could evolve differently. Then [in the stormy
anarchy of the February Revolution] Russia saw the signs of law, freedom and
respect for human dignity by the state, but they all were swept away by the
peoples wrath.2923
Here is a more recent dazzling treatment of Jewish participation in
Bolshevism: The Bolshevism of Lenin and Russian Social Democratic
Workers Party of Bolsheviks was just an intellectual and civilized form of
plebian Bolshevism. Should the former fail, the latter, much more dreadful,
would prevail. Therefore, by widely participating in the Bolshevik
Revolution, providing it with cadres of intellectuals and organizers, the Jews
saved Russia from total mob rule. They came out with the most humane of
2923B. Shragin. Protivostoyanie dukha [Standoff of the Spirit (hereinafter B. Shragin)].
London: Overseas Publications, 1977, p. 160, 188-189.
possible forms of Bolshevism.2924 Alas, just as the rebellious people had used
the Party of Lenin to overthrow the democracy of intellectuals [when did that
exist?], the pacified people used Stalins bureaucracy to get rid of everything
still harboring free intellectual spirit.2925 Sure, sure: the guilt of the
intelligentsia for the subsequent dismal events of Russian history is greatly
exaggerated. And in the first place, the intelligentsia is liable to itself, 2926 and
by no means to the people. On the contrary, it would be nice if the people
realized their guilt before the intelligentsia.2927
Indeed, the totalitarian rule in its essence and origin is that of the
people.2928 This is a totalitarian country because such was the choice of
Russian people.2929
It is all because the Tatars wild spirit captured the soul of Orthodox
Russia,2930 that is, the Asian social and spiritual structure, inherited by the
Russians from the Mongols is stagnant and incapable of development and
progress.2931 (Well, Lev Gumilev also developed a theory that instead of the
Tatar yoke, there was a friendly alliance of Russians and Tatars. However,
Russian folklore, in its many proverbs referring to Tatars as to enemies and
oppressors, provided an unambiguous answer to that question. Folklore does not
lie; it is not pliant like a scientific theory.) Therefore, the October coup was an
unprecedented breakthrough of the Asian essence [of Russians].2932
For those who want to tear and trample Russian history, Chaadayev is the
favorite theoretician (although he is undoubtedly an outstanding thinker). First
Samizdat and later migr publications carefully selected and passionately
quoted his published and unpublished texts which suited their purposes. As to
the unsuitable quotations and to the fact that the main opponents of Chaadayev
among his contemporaries were not Nicholas I and Benckendorff, but his
2924Nik. Shulgin. Novoe russkoe samosoznanie [The New Russian Mind]. // Vek 20 i mir [The
20th Century and the World]. Moscow, 1990, (3), p. 27.
2925M. Meyerson-Aksenov. Rozhdeniye novoi intelligentsii [The Birth of New Intelligentsia]. //
Samosoznanie: Sb. statei. [Self-consciousness: The Collection of Articles]. New York:
Chronicles, 1976, p. 102.
2926B. Shragin, p, 246, 249.
2927O. Altaev. Dvoinoe soznanie intelligentsii i psevdo-kultura [Dual Mind of Intelligentsia
and Pseudo-Culture]. // Vestnik Russkogo Studencheskogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniya
[Herald of Russian Student Christian Movement]. Paris New York, 1970, (97), p. 11.
2928M. Meyerson-Aksenov. Rozhdeniye novoi intelligentsii [The Birth of New Intelligentsia]. //
Samosoznanie: Sb. statei. [Self-consciousness: The Collection of Articles]. New York:
Chronicles, 1976, p. 102.
2929Beni Peled. My ne smozhem zhdat escho dve tysyachi let! [We cannot wait for another two
thousand years!]. [Interview] // 22: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal
evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the
Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel]. Tel-Aviv, 1981, (17), p. 114.
2930N. Prat. Emigrantskie kompleksy v istoricheskom aspekte [Emigrants Fixations in the
Historical Perspective]. // Vremya i my: Mezhdunarodny zhurnal literatury i
obshchestvennykh problem [Epoch and We (hereinafter EW): International Journal of
Literature and Social Problems]. New York, 1980, (56), p. 191.
2931B. Shragin, p, 304.
2932Ibid., p. 305
friends Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Karamzin, and Yazikov these facts were
ignored.
In the early 1970s, the hate against all things Russian was gathering steam.
Derogatory expressions about Russian culture entered Samizdat and
contemporary slang. Human pigsty so much contempt for Russia as being
spoiled material was expressed in the anonymous Samizdat article signed by S.
Telegin (G. Kopylov)! Regarding the forest fires of 1972, the same Telegin
cursed Russia in a Samizdat leaflet: So, the Russian forests burn? It serves
Russia right for all her evil-doing!! The entire people consolidate into the
reactionary mass (G. Pomerants). Take another sincere confession: The sound
of an accordion [the popular Russian national instrument] drives me berserk;
the very contact with these masses irritates me. 2933 Indeed, love cannot be
forced. Jews,Jewish destiny is just the rehash of the destiny of intelligentsia
in this country, the destiny of her culture; the Jewish orphanage symbolizes
loneliness because of the collapse of the traditional faith in the people.2934
(What a transformation happened between the 19th and mid-20th century with
the eternal Russian problem of the people! By now they view the people as
an indigenous mass, apathetically satisfied with its existence and its leaders.
And by the inscrutable providence of Fate, the Jews were forced to live and
suffer in the cities of their country. To love these masses is impossible; to care
about them unnatural.) The same Khazanov (by then still in the USSR)
reasoned: The Russia which I love is a Platonic idea that does not exist in
reality. The Russia which I see around is abhorrent; she is a unique kind of
Augean stables; her mangy inhabitants; therell be a day of shattering
reckoning for all she is today.2935
Indeed, there will be a day of reckoning, though not for the state of
adversity that had fallen on Russia much earlier.

In the 1960s, many among intelligentsia began to think and talk about the
situation in the USSR, about its future and about Russia itself. Due to strict
government censorship these arguments and ideas were mentioned only in
private or in mostly pseudonymous Samizdat articles. But when Jewish
emigration began, the criticisms of Russia openly and venomously spilled
across the free Western world, as it formed one of the favorite topics among the
migrs and was voiced so loudly that often nothing else could be heard.
In 1968, Arkady Belinkov fled abroad. He was supposedly a fierce enemy
of the Soviet regime and not at all of the Russian people. Wasnt he? Well,
consider his article The Land of Slaves, the Land of Masters in The New Bell, a

2933M. Deich. Zapiski postoronnego [Commentaries of an Outsider]. // 22, 1982, (26), p.

156.
2934B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [new Russia]. // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 143.
2935Ibid., p. 141, 142, 144.
collection he edited himself. And at what did he direct his wrath? (It is worth
considering that the article was written back in the USSR and the author did not
have enough courage to accuse the regime itself.) Belinkov does not use the
word Soviet even once, instead preferring a familiar theme: eternally
enslaved Russia, freedom for our homeland is worse than gobbling broken
glass and in Russia they sometimes hang the wrong people, sometimes the
wrong way, and never enough. Even in the 1820s it was much evident that in
the process of evolution, the population of [Russia] would turn into a herd of
traitors, informers, and torturers; it was the Russian fear to prepare warm
clothes and to wait for a knock at the door note that even here it was not the
Soviet fear. (Yet who before the Bolshevik revolution had ever waited for a
knock on the door in the middle of the night?) The court in Russia does not
judge, it already knows everything. Therefore, in Russia, it only condemns. 2936
(Was it like that even during the Alexandrine reforms?. And what about juries
and magistrates? Hardly a responsible, balanced judgment!)
Indeed, so overwhelming is the authors hate and so bitter his bile that he
vilifies such great Russian writers as Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Tyutchev and even
Pushkin, not to mention Russian society in general for its insufficient
revolutionary spirit: a pathetic society of slaves, descendants of slaves and
ancestors of slaves, the cattle trembling from fear and anger, rectum-pipers,
shuddering at the thought of possible consequences, the Russian intelligentsia
always been willing to help stifle freedom.2937
Well, if, for Belinkov, it was all masked anti-Soviet sentiments, a sly
wink, then why did he not rewrite it abroad? If Belinkov actually thought
differently, then why print it in this form?
No, that is the way he thought and what he hated. So was this how dissident
Jews repudiated Bolshevism?
Around the same time, at the end of the 1960s, a Jewish collection about
the USSR was published in London. It included a letter from the USSR: In the
depths of the inner labyrinths of the Russian soul, there is always a
pogromist. A slave and a thug dwell there too.2938 Belotserkovsky happily
repeats someone elses joke: the Russians are a strong nation, except for their
heads.2939 Let all these Russians, Ukrainians growl drunkenly with their
wives, gobble vodka and get happily misled by communist lies without us
They were crawling on all fours worshipping wood and stone when we gave
them the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.2940

2936A. Belinkov. Strana rabov, strana gospod [The land of slaves, the land of masters]. // The
New Bell: The Collection of Literary and Opinion Writings. London, 1972, p. 323, 339,
346, 350.
2937Ibid., p. 325-328, 337, 347, 355.
2938N. Shapiro. Slovo ryadovogo sovetskogo evreya [The Word of an Ordinary Soviet Jew]. //
The Russian Anti-Semitism and Jews. Collection of essays. London, 1968, p. 50-51.
2939The New American, New York, 1982, March 23-29, (110), p. 11.
2940Jakob Yakir. Ya pishu Viktoru Krasinu [I Write to Viktor Krasin]. // Our Country, Tel Aviv,
1973, December 12. Cited from the New Journal, 1974, (117), p. 190.
 Oh, if only you would have held your peace! This would have been
regarded as your wisdom. (Job 13:5).
(Let us note that any insulting judgment about the Russian soul in
general or about the Russian character generally does not give rise to the
slightest protest or doubt among civilized people. The question of daring to
judge nations as one uniform and faceless whole does not arise. If someone
does not like all things Russian or feels contempt for them, or even expresses in
progressive circles the belief that Russia is a cesspool, this is no sin in Russia
and it does not appear reactionary or backward. And no one immediately
appeals to presidents, prime ministers, senators, or members of Congress with a
reverent cry, What do you think of such incitement of ethnic hatred? Weve
said worse of ourselves since the 19th century and right up to the revolution. We
have a rich tradition of this.)
Then we learn of semi-literate preachers of their religion, and that
Russian Orthodoxy hasnt earned the credence of intellectuals (from
Telegin). The Russians so easily abandoned the faith of their forefathers,
indifferently watched how their temples were destroyed in front of their eyes.
Oh, here is a guess: Perhaps, the Russian people only temporarily submitted to
the power of Christianity? That is for 950 years! And they only waited for the
moment to get rid of it,2941 that is, for the revolution? How much ill will must
accumulate in someones heart to utter something like that! (Even Russian
publicists often slipped into this trap of distorted consciousness. The eminent
early emigrant journalist S. Rafalsky, perhaps even a priests son, wrote that
Orthodox Holy Russia allowed its holy sites to be easily crushed.2942 Of
course, the groans of those mowed down by Chekists machine guns during
Church riots in 1918 were not heard in Paris. There have been no uprisings
since. I would like to have seen this priests son try to save the sacred sites in
the 1920s himself.)
Sometimes it is stated bluntly: Russian Orthodoxy is a Hottentot religion
(Grobman). Or, idiocy perfumed by Rublev, Dionysius and Berdyaev; the idea
of the restoration of traditional Russian historical orthodoxy scares many.
This is the darkest future possible for the country and for Christianity. 2943 Or, as
novelist F. Gorenshtein said: Jesus Christ was the Honorary Chairman of the
Union of the Russian People [pre-revolutionary Russian Nationalist
organization], whom they perceived as a kind of universal ataman [Cossack
chieftain].2944
Dont make it too sharp you might chip the blade!
However, one must distinguish from such open rudeness that velvet soft
Samizdat philosopher-essayist Grigory Pomerants who worked in those years.
2941Amram. Reaktsiya ottorzheniya [The Reaction of Rejection]. // 22, 1979, (5), p. 201.
2942The New Russian Word, New York, 1975, November 30, p. 3.
2943M. Ortov. Pravoslavnoe gosudarstvo I tserkov [The orthodox State and the Church]. The
Way: The Orthodox Almanac. New York, 1984, May-June, (3), p. 12, 15.
2944F. Gorenshtein. Shestoi konets krasnoi zvezdy [The Sixs Point of the Red Star]. // EW, New
York, 1982, (65), p. 125.
Presumably, he rose above all controversies he wrote about the fates of
nations in general, about the fate of the intelligentsia generally; he suggested
that nowadays no such thing as people exists, save, perhaps, Bushmen. I read
him in 1960s Samizdat saying: The people are becoming more and more vapid
broth and only we, the intelligentsia, remain the salt of the earth. Solidarity of
the intelligentsia across the borders is a more real thing than the solidarity of the
intelligentsia and its people.
It sounded very modern and wise. And yet, in Czechoslovakia in 1968 it
was precisely the unity of the intelligentsia with the vapid broth of its non-
existent people that created a spiritual stronghold long unheard of in Europe.
The presence of two-thirds of a million Soviet troops couldnt break their spirit;
it was their communist leaders who eventually gave in. (And 12 years later, the
same thing happened in Poland.)
In his typically ambiguous manner of constructing endless parallel
arguments that never merge into a clear logical construct, Pomerants never
explicitly addressed the national question. He extensively dwelt on the Diaspora
question, in the most abstract and general manner, not specifying any nation,
hovering aloft in relativism and agnosticism. He glorified the Diaspora:
Everywhere, we are not exactly strangers. Everywhere, we are not exactly
natives. An appeal to one faith, tradition and nation flies in the face of
another. He complained: According to the rules established for the Warsaw
students, one can love only one nation but what if I am related by blood to
this country, but love others as well?2945
This is a sophisticated bait-and-switch. Of course, you can love not only
one, but ten or more countries and nations. However, you can belong to and be
a son of only one motherland, just as you can only have one mother.
To make the subject clearer, I want to describe the letter exchange I had
with the Pomerants couple in 1967. By that year, my banned novel The First
Circle circulated among the Samizdat and among the first who had sent me
their objections were G. S. Pomerants and his wife, Z. A. Mirkin. They said
that I hurt them by my inept and faulty handling of the Jewish question, and that
I had irreparably damaged the image of Jews in the novel and thus my own
image. How did I damage it? I thought I had managed to avoid showing those
cruel Jews who reached the heights of power during the early Soviet years. But
Pomerants letters abounded with undertones and nuances, and they accused me
of insensitivity to Jewish pain.
I replied to them, and they replied to me. In these letters we also discussed
the right to judge entire nations, even though I had done no such thing in my
novel.
Pomerants suggested to me then and to every writer in general as well as
to anyone who offers any personal, psychological or social judgment to
behave and to reason as if no nation has ever existed in the world not only to

2945G. Pomerants. Chelovek niotkuda [The Man from Nowhere]. From G. Pomerants,
Unpublished. Frankfurt, Posev, 1972, p. 143, 145, 161-162.
abstain from judging them as a whole but to ignore every mans nationality.
What is natural and excusable for Ivan Denisovich (to see Cesar Markovich as
a non-Russian) is a disgrace for an intellectual, and for a Christian (not a
baptized person but a Christian) is a great sin: There is no Hellene and no Jew
for me.
What an elevated point of view. May God help us all reach it one day. After
all, without it, would not the meaning of united humanity, and so Christinaity,
have been useless?
Yet we have already been aggressively convinced once that there are no
nations, and were instructed to quickly destroy our own, and we madly did it
back then.
In addition, regardless of the argument, how can we portray specific people
without referring to their nationality? And if there are no nations, are there no
languages? But no writer can write in any language other than his native one. If
nations would wither away, languages would die also.
One cannot eat from an empty bowl.
I noticed that it was more often Jews than any others who insisted that we
pay no attention to nationality! What does nationality have to do with
anything? What national characteristics, what national character are you
talking about?
And I was ready to shake hands on that: I agree! Lets ignore it from now
on.
But we live in our unfortunate century, when perhaps the first feature
people notice in others for some reason is exactly their nationality. And, I swear,
Jews are the ones who distinguish and closely monitor it most jealously and
carefully. Their own nation.
Then, what should we do with the fact you have read about it above that
Jews so often judge Russians precisely in generalized terms, and almost always
to condemn? The same Pomerants writes about the pathological features of the
Russian character, including their internal instability. (And he is not
concerned that he judges the entire nation. Imagine if someone spoke of
pathological features of the Jewish character What would happen then?)
The Russian masses allowed all the horrors of Oprichnina to happen just as
they later allowed Stalins death camps.2946 (See, the Soviet internationalist
bureaucratic elite would have stopped them if not for this dull mass.) More
sharply still, Russian Nationalism will inevitably end in an aggressive
pogrom,2947 meaning that every Russian who loves his nation already has the
potential for being pogromist.
We can but repeat the words of that Chekhovs character: Too early!
Most remarkable was how Pomerantss second letter to me ended. Despite
his previously having so insistently demanded that it is not proper to distinguish

2946G. Pomerants. Sny zemli [Nightdreams of Earth]. // 22, 1980, (12), p. 129.
2947G. Pomerants. Chelovek niotkuda [The Man from Nowhere]. From G. Pomerants,
Unpublished. Frankfurt, Posev, 1972, p. 157.
between nations, in that large and emotionally charged letter, (written in a very
angry, heavy hand), he delivered an ultimatum on how I could still save my
disgusting The First Circle. The offered remedy was this: to turn Gerasimovich
[the hero] into a Jew! So a Jew would commit the novels greatest act of
spiritual heroism! It is absolutely not important that Gerasimovich had been
drawn from a Russian prototype, says our indifferent-to-nations author (italics
added). In truth, he did give me an alternative: if I still insisted on leaving
Gerasimovich Russian, then I must add an equally powerful image of a noble,
self-sacrificing Jew to my story. And if I would not follow any of his advice,
Pomerants threatened to open a public campaign against me. (I ignored it at this
point.)
Notably, he conducted this one-sided battle, calling it our polemic, first in
foreign journals and, when it became possible, in the Soviet magazines, often
repeating and reprinting the same articles, although taking care each time to
exorcise the blemishes his critics had picked up the last time. In the course of
this he uttered another pearl of wisdom: there was only one Absolute Evil in the
world and it was Hitlerism in this regard, our philosopher was not a relativist,
not at all. But as to communism, this former prisoner of the camps and by no
means a Communist himself, suddenly proclaims that communism is not an
unquestionable evil (and even some spirit of democracy surrounded the early
Cheka), and he does so harder and harder over the years (reacting to my
intransigence towards communism).2948 On the other hand, hard core anti-
communism is undoubtedly evil, especially if it builds upon the Russian
Nationalism (which, as he had reminded us earlier, cannot be separated from
pogroms).
That is where Pomerantss smooth high-minded and non-national
principles led.
Given such a skewed bias, can mutual understanding between Russians and
Jews be achieved?
You mark the speck in your brothers eye, but ignore the plank in your
own.
In those same months when I corresponded with Pomerants, some liberal
hand in the Leningrad Regional Party Committee copied a secret memorandum
signed by Shcherbakov, Smirnov, and Utekhin on the matter of alleged
destructive Zionist activity in the city with subtle forms of ideological
subversion. My Jewish friends asked me How should we deal with this? It
is clear, how, I replied before even reading the paper Openness! Publish it
in Samizdat! Our strength is transparency and publicity! But my friends
hesitated: We cannot do it just like that because it would be misunderstood.
After reading the documents, I understood their anxiety. From the reports, it
was clear that the youths literary evening at the Writers House on January 30,
1968 had been politically honest and brave the government with its politics

2948G. Pomerants. Son o spravedlivom vozmezdii [A Dream about Recompense]. // Syntaksis:

Journalism, Critique, Polemic. Paris, 1980, (6), p. 21.
and ideology had been both openly and covertly ridiculed. On the other hand,
the speeches had clear national emphases (perhaps, the youth there were mostly
Jewish); they contained explicit resentment and hostility, and even, perhaps,
contempt for Russians, and longing for Jewish spirituality. It was because of this
that my friends were wary of publishing the document in Samizdat.
I was suddenly struck by how true these Jewish sentiments were. Russia is
reflected in the window glass of a beer stand, the poet Ufland had supposedly
said there. How horrifyingly true! It seemed that the speakers accused the
Russians, not directly, but by allusions, of crawling under counters of beer pubs
and of being dragged from the mud by their wives; that they drink vodka until
unconscious, they squabble and steal.
We must see ourselves objectively, see our fatal shortcomings. Suddenly, I
grasped the Jewish point of view; I looked around and I was horrified as well:
Dear God, where we, the Jews? Cards, dominoes, gaping at TV. What cattle,
what animals surround us! They have neither God nor spiritual interests. And so
much feeling of hurt from past oppression rises in your soul.
Only it is forgotten, that the real Russians were killed, slaughtered and
suppressed, and the rest were stupefied, embittered, and driven to the extremes
by Bolshevik thugs and not without the zealous participation of the fathers of
todays young Jewish intellectuals. Modern day Jews are irritated by those mugs
who have become the Soviet leadership since the 1940s but they irritate us as
well. However, the best among us were killed, not spared.
Do not look back! Pomerants lectured us later in his Samizdat essays;
do not look back like Orpheus who lost Eurydice this way.
Yet we have already lost more than Eurydice.
We were taught since the 1920s to throw away the past and jump on board
modernity.
But the old Russian proverb advises go ahead but always look back.
We must look back. Otherwise, we would never understand anything.

Even if we had tried not to look back, we would always be reminded that the
core [Russian issue] is in fact the inferiority complex of the spiritless leaders
of the people that has persisted throughout its long history, and this very
complex pushed the Russian Tsarist government towards military conquests.
An inferiority complex is disease of mediocrity.2949 Do you want to know why
the Revolution of 1917 happened in Russia? Can you guess? Yes, the same
inferiority complex caused a revolution in Russia.2950 (Oh, immortal Freud, is
there nothing he hasnt explained?)

2949L. Frank. Eshche raz o russkom voprose [The Russian Question Once Again]. //
Russkaya mysl [The Russian Thinker], 1989, May 19, p. 13.
2950Amrozh. Sovetskii antisemitism prichiny i prognozy [Soviet Anti-Semitism: Causes and
Prospects]. Seminar. // 22, 1978, (3), p. 153.
 They even stated that Russian socialism was a direct heir of Russian
autocracy2951 precisely a direct one, it goes without saying. And, almost in
unison, there is direct continuity between the Tsarist government and
communism there is qualitative similarity.2952 What else could you expect
from Russian history, founded on blood and provocations? 2953 In a review of
Agurskys interesting book, Ideology of National Bolshevism, we find that in
reality, traditional, fundamental ideas of the Russian national consciousness
began to penetrate into the practice and ideology of the ruling party very early;
the party ideology was transformed as early as the mid-1920s. Really?
Already in the mid-1920s? How come we missed it at the time? Wasnt it the
same mid-1920s when the very words Russian, I am Russian had been
considered counter-revolutionary? I remember it well. But, you see, even back
then, in the midst of persecution against all that was Russian and Orthodox, the
party ideology began in practice to be persistently guided by the national idea;
outwardly preserving its internationalist disguise, Soviet authorities actually
engaged in the consolidation of the Russian state.2954 Of course! Contrary to
its internationalist declarations, the revolution in Russia has remained a national
affair.2955 This Russia, upturned by revolution, continued to build the peoples
state.2956
Peoples state? How dare they say that, knowing of the Red Terror, of the
millions of peasants killed during collectivization, and of the insatiable Gulag?
No, Russia is irrevocably condemned for all her history and in all her
forms. Russia is always under suspicion, the Russian idea without anti-
Semitism seems to be no longer an idea and not even the Russian one. Indeed,
hostility towards culture is a specific Russian phenomenon; how many times
have we heard that they are supposedly the only ones in the whole world who
have preserved purity and chastity, respecting God in the middle of their native
wilderness;2957 the greatest soulful sincerity has supposedly found shelter in
this crippled land. This soulful sincerity is being presented to us as a kind of
national treasure, a unique product like caviar.2958
Yes, make fun of us Russians; it is for our own good. Unfortunately, there
is some truth to these words. But, while expressing them, do not lapse into such
hatred. Having long been aware of the terrifying decline of our nation under the
communists, it was precisely during those 1970s that we gingerly wrote about a
2951V. Gusman. Perestroika: mify i realnost [Perestroika: Myths and the Reality]. // 22,
1990, (70), p. 139, 142.
2952B. Shragin, p, 99.
2953M. Amusin. Peterburgskie strasti [Passions of St. Petersburg]. // 22, 1995, (96), p. 191.
2954I. Serman. Review. // 22, 1982, (26), p. 210-212.
2955B. Shragin, p, 158.
2956M. Meyerson-Aksenov. Rozhdeniye novoi intelligentsii [The Birth of New Intelligentsia]. //
Samosoznanie: Sb. statei. [Self-consciousness: The Collection of Articles] New York:
Chronicles, 1976, p. 102.
2957B. Khazanov. Pisma bez stempelya [The Letters without Postmark]. // EW, New York,
1982, (69), p. 156, 158, 163.
2958B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [New Russia]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 142.
hope of revival of our morals and culture. But strangely enough, the
contemporary Jewish authors attacked the idea of Russian revival with a
relentless fury, as if (or because?) they feared that Soviet culture would be
replaced by the Russian one. I am afraid that the new dawn of this doomed
country would be even more repugnant than its current [1970-1980s]
decline.2959
Looking back from the democratic 1990s, we can agree that it was a
prophetic declaration. Still, was it said with compassion or with malice?
And here is even more: Beware, when someone tells you to love your
homeland: such love is charged with hatred. Beware of stories that tell you
that in Russia, Russians are the worst off, that Russians suffered the most, and
that the Russian population is dwindling sure, as we all know, this is a lie!
Be careful when someone tells you about that great statesman who was
assassinated (i.e., Stolypin) is that also a deception? No, it is not a deception:
Not because the facts are incorrect nevertheless, do not accept even these
true facts: Be careful, be aware!2960
There is something extraordinary in this stream of passionate accusations.
Who would have guessed during the fiery 1920s that after the enfeeblement
and downfall of that beautiful (i.e., Communist) regime in Russia, those Jews,
who themselves had suffered much from communism, who seemingly cursed it
and ran away from it, would curse and kick not communism, but Russia itself
blast her from Israel and from Europe, and from across the ocean!? There are so
many, such confident voices ready to judge Russias many crimes and failings,
her inexhaustible guilt towards the Jews and they so sincerely believe this
guilt to be inexhaustible almost all of them believe it! Meanwhile, their own
people are coyly cleared of any responsibility for their participation in Cheka
shootings, for sinking the barges and their doomed human cargo in the White
and Caspian seas, for their role in collectivization, the Ukrainian famine and in
all the abominations of the Soviet administration, for their talented zeal in
brainwashing the natives. This is not contrition.
We, brothers or strangers, need to share that responsibility.
It would have been cleanest and healthiest to exchange contrition for
everything committed.
I will not stop calling the Russians to do that.
And I am inviting the Jews to do the same. To repent not for Trotsky,
Kamenev and Zinoviev; they are known and anyway can be brushed aside,
they were not real Jews! Instead, I invite Jews to look honestly into the
oppressive depths of the early Soviet system, at all those invisible characters
such as Isai Davidovich Berg, who created the infamous gas wagon2961 which
later brought so much affliction on the Jews themselves, and I call on them to
2959M. Vaiskopf. Sobstvenny Platon [Our Own Platon]. // 22, 1981, (22), p. 168.
2960B. Khazanov. Po kom zvonit zatonuvshy kolokol [For Whom the Sunken Bell Tolls]. //
Strana i mir: Obshchestvenno-politichesky, economichesky i kulturno-filosofsky zhurnal
[Country and World: Social, Political, Economic and Cultural-Philosophical Journal
(henceforth Country and World]. Munich, 1986, (12), p. 93-94.
look honestly on those many much more obscure bureaucrats who had pushed
papers in the Soviet apparatus, and who had never appeared in light.
However, the Jews would not be Jews if they all behaved the same.
So other voices were heard.
As soon as the great exodus of Jews from the USSR began there were Jews
who fortunately for all, and to their honor while remaining faithful to
Judaism, went above their own feelings and looked at history from that vantage
point. It was a joy to hear them, and we hear them still. What hope for the future
it gives! Their understanding and support are especially valuable in the face of
the violently thinned and drastically depleted ranks of Russian intelligentsia.
A melancholy view, expressed at end of 19th century, comes to mind:
Every country deserves the Jews it has.2962
It depends where you look.
If it were not for voices from the third wave of emigration and from Israel,
one would despair of dialogue and of possibility for mutual understanding
between Russians and Jews.
Roman Rutman, a cybernetics worker, had his first article published in the
migr Samizdat in 1973. It was a bright, warm story of how he first decided to
emigrate and how it turned out and even then he showed distinct warmth
towards Russia. The title was illustrative: A bow to those who has gone and
my brotherhood to those who remain.2963 Among his very first thoughts during
his awakening was Are we Jews or Russians?; and among his thoughts on
departure there was Russia, crucified for mankind.
Next year, in 1974, in an article The Ring of Grievances, he proposed to
revise some established ideas on the Jewish question and to recognize the
risk of overemphasizing these ideas. There were three: (1) The unusual fate of
the Jewish people made them a symbol of human suffering; (2) A Jew in
Russia has always been a victim of unilateral persecution; and (3) Russian
society is indebted to the Jewish people. He quoted a phrase from The Gulag
Archipelago: During this war we discovered that the worst thing on earth is to
be a Russian and recognized that the phrase is not artificial or empty, that it is
based on war losses, on the revolutionary terror before that, on hunger, on the
wanton destruction of both the nations head its cognitive elite, and its feet,
the peasantry. Although modern Russian literature and democratic movements
preach about the guilt of Russian society before Jews, the author himself prefers
to see the circle of grievances instead of the saccharine sentimentality about

2961E. Zhirnov. Protsedura kazni nosila omerzitelny kharakter [The Execution was
Abominable]. // Komsomolskaya Pravda, 1990, October 28, p. 2.
2962M. Morgulis. Evreisky vopros v ego osnovaniyakh i chastnostyakh [The Basics and Details
of the Jewish Question]. // Voskhod, St. Petersburg, January 1881, Book 1, p. 18.
2963R. Rutman. Ukhodyashchemu poklon, ostayushchemusya bratstvo [A bow to those who
has gone and my brotherhood to those who remain]. // New Journal, New York, 1973,
(112), p. 284-297.
the troubles and talents of the Jewish people. To break this circle of
grievances one must pull at it from both sides.2964
Here it is a thoughtful, friendly and calm voice.
And over these years, we many times heard the firm voice of Michael
Kheifetz, a recent GULag prisoner. A champion of my people, I cannot but
sympathize with the nationalists of other peoples.2965 He had the courage to call
for Jewish repentance: The experience of the German people, who have not
turned away from their horrifying and criminal past, and who never tried to lay
the blame for Nazism on some other culprits, on strangers, etc. but, instead
constantly cleansed itself in the fire of national repentance, and thus created a
German state that for the first time was admired and respected by all mankind;
this experience should, in my opinion, become a paragon for the peoples that
participated in the crimes of Bolshevism, including the Jews. We, Jews, must
honestly analyze the role we played in other nations affairs, the role so
extraordinarily foretold by Z. Jabotinsky.2966
M. Kheifetz demonstrated a truly noble soul when he spoke of the genuine
guilt of assimilated Jews before the native peoples of those countries where they
live, the guilt, which cannot and must not allow them to live comfortably in the
Diaspora. About Soviet Jewry of the 1920s and 1930s he said: Who if not us,
their bitterly remorseful descendants, has the right to condemn them for this
historic mistake [zealous participation in building communism] and the settling
of historical scores with Russia for the Pale of Settlement and the pogroms? 2967
(Kheifetz also mentioned that B. Penson and M. Korenblit, who had served
labor camp terms along with him, shared his views.)
Almost simultaneously with the words of Kheifetz, by then already an
emigrant, Feliks Svetov vividly called out for Jewish repentance from inside the
Soviet Union in a Samizdat novel Open the doors to me.2968 (It was no accident
that F. Svetov, due to his Jewish perceptivity and intelligence, was one of the
first to recognize the beginning of Russian religious revival.)
Later, during a passionate discourse surrounding the dispute between
Astafiev and Edelman, Yuri Shtein described our Ashkenazi-specific
personality traits, formed on the basis of our belief of belonging to the chosen
people and an insular, small town mentality. Hence, there is a belief in the
infallibility of our nation and our claim to a monopoly on suffering. It is time
for us to see ourselves as a normal nation, worthy but not faultless, like all the
2964R. Rutman. Koltso obid [Circle of Grievances]. // New Journal, New York, 1974, (117), p.
178-189; and in English: Soviet Jewish Affairs, London, 1974, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 3-11.
2965M. Kheifetz. Russkii patriot Vladimir Osipov [Russian Patriot Vladimir Osipov]. //
Kontinent: Literaturny, obshchestvenno-politichesky i religiozny zhurnal [Continent:
Literary, Social, Political and Religious Journal (henceforth Continent]. Paris, 1981, (27),
p. 209.
2966M. Kheifetz. Nashi obshchie uroki [The Lessons We Shared]. // 22, 1980, (14), p. 162-
163.
2967M. Kheifetz. Evreiskie zametki [The Jewish Notes]. Paris. Tretya volna [The Third Wave],
1978, p. 42, 45.
2968Feliks Svetov. Open the doors to me. Paris: Editeurs Reunls, 1978.
other peoples of the world. Especially now, that we have our own independent
state and have already proved to the world that Jews can fight and plow better
than some more populous ethnic groups.2969
During the left liberal campaign against V. Astafiev, V. Belov, and V.
Rasputin, literary historian Maria Shneyerson, who, after emigrating, continued
to love Russia dearly and appreciate Russian problems, offered these writers her
enthusiastic support.2970
In the 1970s, a serious, competent, and forewarning book on the
destruction of the environment in the USSR under communism was published
in the West. Written by a Soviet author, it was naturally published under a
pseudonym, B. Komarov. After some time, the author emigrated and we learned
his name Zeev Wolfson. We discovered even more: that he was among the
compilers of the album of destroyed and desecrated churches in Central
Russia.2971
Few active intellectuals remained in the defeated Russia, but friendly,
sympathetic Jewish forces supported them. With this shortage of people and
under the most severe persecution by the authorities, our Russian Public
Foundation was established to help victims of persecution; I donated all my
royalties for The Gulag Archipelago to this fund; and, starting with its first
talented and dedicated manager, Alexander Ginzburg, there were many Jews
and half-Jews among the Funds volunteers. (This gave certain intellectually
blind extreme Russian nationalists sufficient reason to brand our Foundation as
being Jewish.)
Similarly, M. Bernshtam, then Y. Felshtinsky and D.Shturman were
involved in our study of modern Russian history.
In the fight against communist lies, M. Agursky, D.Shturman, A. Nekrich,
M. Geller, and A. Serebrennikov distinguished themselves by their brilliant,
fresh, and fair-minded journalism.
We can also recall the heroism of the American professor Julius Epstein
and his service to Russia. In self-centered, always self-righteous, and never
regretful of any wrongdoings America, he single-handedly revealed the mystery
of Operation Keelhaul, how after the end of the war and from their own
continent, Americans handed over to Stalinist agents and therefore certain
death, hundreds and thousands of Russian Cossacks, who had naively believed
that since they reached the land of free they had been saved.2972

2969Yu. Shtein. Letter to Editor. // Country and World, 1987, (2), p. 112.
2970M. Shneyerson. Razreshennaya pravda [Allowable Truth]. // Continent, 1981, (28); see
also: M. Shneyerson. Khudozhestvenny mir pisatelya i pisatel v miru [The Artistic World of
an Author and the Author in the World]. // Continent, 1990, (62).
2971B. Komarov. Unichtozhenie prirody [Destruction of the Nature]. Frankfurt: Posev, 1978;
Razrushennye i oskvernennye khramy: Moskva i Srednyaya Rossia [Destroyed and
Desecrated Churches: Moscow and Central Russia]. Afterword: Predely vandalizma [The
Limits of Vandalism]. Frankfurt: Posev, 1980.
2972Julius Epstein. Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the
Present. Old Greenwich, Connecticut: Devin-Adair, 1973.
 All these examples should encourage sincere and mutual understanding
between Russians and Jews, if only we would not shut it out by intolerance and
anger.
Alas, even the mildest remembrance, repentance, and talk of justice elicits
severe outcries from the self-appointed guardians of extreme nationalism, both
Russian and Jewish. As soon as Solzhenitsyn had called for national
repentance meaning among Russians, and the author didnt mind that here
we are! Our own people are right there in the front line. He did not mention
any name specifically but he probably referred to M. Kheifetz. See, it turns out
that we are more to blame, we helped to install no, not helped, but simply
established the Soviet regime ourselves were disproportionately present in
various organs.2973
Those who began to speak in a voice of remorse were furiously attacked in
an instant. They prefer to extract from their hurrah-patriotic gut a mouthful of
saliva what a style and nobility of expression! and to thoroughly spit on
all ancestors, to curse Trotsky and Bagritsky, Kogan, and Dunaevsky; M.
Kheifetz invites us to purge ourselves in the fire of national repentance.2974
And what a thrashing F. Svetov received for the autobiographical hero of
his novel: A book about conversion to Christianity will contribute not to an
abstract search for repentance, but to a very specific anti-Semitism. This book
is anti-Semitic. Yes, and what is there to repent? The indefatigable David
Markish angrily exclaims. Svetovs hero sees a betrayal in the fact that we
desert the country, leaving behind a deplorable condition which is entirely our
handiwork: it is we, as it turns out, who staged a bloody revolution, shot the
father-tsar, befouled and raped the Orthodox Church and in addition, founded
the GULag Archipelago, isnt that right? First, these comrades Trotsky,
Sverdlov, Berman, and Frenkel are not at all related to the Jews. Second, the
very question about someones collective guilt is wrong.2975 (As to blaming
Russians, you see, it is a different thing altogether: it was always acceptable to
blame them en masse, from the times of the elder Philotheus.)
Davids brother, Sh. Markish reasons as follows, as to the latest wave of
immigrants from Russia whether in Israel or in the U.S., they do not exhibit
real Russophobia but a self-hatred that grows into direct anti-Semitism is
obvious in them only too often.2976
See, if Jews repent it is anti-Semitism. (This is yet another new
manifestation of that prejudice.)
The Russians should realize their national guilt, the idea of national
repentance cannot be implemented without a clear understanding of national

2973V. Zeev. Demonstratsiya objektivnosti [Pretending to be Evenhanded]. // New American,

1982, June 1-7, (120), p. 37.
2974V. Boguslavsky. V zashchitu Kunyaeva [In Defence of Kunyaev]. // 22, 1980, (16), p.
166-167, 170.
2975D. Markish. Vykrest [Convert to Christianity]. // 22, 1981, (18), p. 210.
2976Sh. Markish. O evreiskoi nenavisti k Rossii [On the Jewish Hatred towards Russia]. //
22, 1984, (38), p. 218.
guilt. The guilt is enormous, and there is no way to shift it on to others. This
guilt is not only about the things of past, it is also about the vile things Russia
commits now, and will probably continue committing in the future, as Shragin
wrote in the early 1970s.2977
Well, we too tirelessly call the Russians to repent; without penitence, we
will not have a future. After all, only those who were directly affected by
communism recognized its evils. Those who were not affected tried not to
notice the atrocities and later on to forget and forgive them, to the extent that
now they do not even understand what to repent of. (Even more so those who
themselves committed the crimes.)
Every day we are burning with shame for our unsettled people.
And we love it too. And we do not envision our lives without it.
And yet, for some reason, we have not lost all faith in it.
Still, is it absolutely certain that you had no part in our great guilt, in our
unsuccessful history?
Here, Shimon Markish referred to Jabotinskys1920s article. Jabotinsky
several times (on different occasions) observed that Russia is a foreign country
to us, our interest in her should be detached, cool, though sympathetic; her
anxiety, grief and joy are not ours, and our feelings are foreign to her too.
Markish added: Thats also my attitude towards Russian worries. And he
invites us to call a spade a spade. However, regarding this delicate point even
free western Russians are not awesomely courageous. I prefer to deal with
enemies.2978
Yet this sentence should be divided into two: is it the case that to call a
spade a spade and to speak frankly mean being an enemy? Well, there is a
Russian proverb: do not love the agreeable; love the disputers.
I invite all, including Jews, to abandon this fear of bluntness, to stop
perceiving honesty as hostility. We must abandon it historically! Abandon it
forever!
In this book, I call a spade a spade. And at no time do I feel that in doing
so it is being hostile to the Jews. I have written more sympathetically than many
Jews write about Russians.
The purpose of this book, reflected even in its title, is this: we should
understand each other, we should recognize each others standpoint and
feelings. With this book, I want to extend a handshake of understanding for all
our future.
But we must do so mutually!
This interweaving of Jewish and Russian destinies since the 18th century
which has so explosively manifested itself in the 20th century, has a profound
historical meaning, and we should not lose it in the future. Here, perhaps, lies

2977B. Shragin, p, 159.

2978Sh. Markish. Eshche raz o nenavisti k samomu sebe [Once Again on Self-Hatred]. 22,
1980, (16), p. 178-179, 180.
the Divine Intent which we must strive to unravel to discern its mystery and to
do what must be done.
And it seems obvious that to know the truth about our shared past is a
moral imperative for Jews and Russians alike.
 Chapter 26. The beginning of Exodus

The Age of Exodus, as Jews themselves would soon name it, began rather
silently: its start can be traced to a December 1966 article in Izvestiya, where the
Soviet authorities magnanimously approved family reunification, and under
this banner the Jews were given the right to leave the USSR 2979. And then,
half a year later, the historic Six-Day War broke out. Like any epic, this
Exodus began with a miracle. And as it should be in an epic, three miracles
were revealed to the Jews of Russia to the Exodus generation: the miracle of
the foundation of Israel, the miracle of the Purim 1953 (that is, Stalins
death), and the miracle of the joyous, brilliant, intoxicating victory of
1967.2980
The Six-Day War gave a strong and irreversible push to the ethnic
consciousness of the Soviet Jews and delivered a blow to the desire of many to
assimilate. It created among Jews a powerful motivation for national self-
education and the study of Hebrew (within a framework of makeshift centers)
and gave rise to pro-emigration attitudes.
How did the majority of Soviet Jews perceive themselves by the end of the
1960s, on the eve of Exodus? No, those who retrospectively write of a constant
feeling of oppression and stress do not distort their memories: Hearing the
word Jew, they cringe, as if expecting a blow. They themselves use this
sacramental word as rarely as possible, and when they do have to say it, they
force the word out as quickly as possible and in a suppressed voice, as if they
were seized by the throat. Among such people there are those who are
gripped by the eternal incurable fear ingrained in their mentality. 2981 Or take a
Jewish author who wrote of spending her entire professional life worrying that
her work would be rejected only because of her nationality [ethnicity in

2979F. Kolker. Novyi plan pomoshchi sovetskomu evreistvu [A New Plan for Assistance to the
Soviet Jewry]. // 22: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy
intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish
Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel (henceforth 22)]. Tel-Aviv, 1983, (31), p. 145.
2980V. Boguslavsky. Otsy i deti russkoi alii [Fathers and Children of Russian Aliyah]. // 22,
1978, (2), p. 176.
2981I. Domalsky. Tekhnologiya nenavisti [The Technology of Hate]. // Vremya i my:
Mezhdunarodny zhurnal literatury i obshchestvennykh problem [Epoch and We:
International Journal of Literature and Social Problems (henceforth EW)]. Tel Aviv,
1978, (25), p. 106-107.
American terminology].2982 Despite having an apparently higher standard of
living than the general population, many Jews still harbored this sense of
oppression.
Indeed, cultivated Jews complained more of cultural rather than economic
oppression. The Soviet Jews are trying to retain their presence in the
Russian culture. They struggle to retain the Russian culture in their inner
selves.2983 Dora Shturman recalls: When the Russian Jews, whose interests are
chained to Russia, are suddenly deprived even if only on paper or in words
of their right to engage in the Russian life, to participate in the Russian history,
as if they were interlopers or strangers, they feel offended and bewildered. With
the appearance of Tamizdat [a Russian neologism for dissident self-published
(Samizdat) literature, published outside the USSR (from the Russian word,
tam, meaning there or out there)] and Samizdat, the xenophobia felt by
some Russian authors toward Jews who sincerely identified themselves as
Russians manifested itself for the first time in many years, not only on the street
level and on the level of state bureaucracy, but appeared on the elite intellectual
level, even among dissidents. Naturally, this surprised Jews who identified with
Russians.2984 Galich: Many people brought up in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s
used to regard themselves as Russians from their earliest years, in fact from
birth, and indeed they share all their values and thoughts with the Russian
culture.2985
Another author drew the portrait of the average modern Russian Jew,
who would serve this country with good faith and fidelity. He had carefully
examined and identified his own flaws. He had become aware of them. And
now he tries to get rid of them he has stopped arms flourishing. He has
gotten rid of his national peculiarities of speech which were carried over into
Russian. At some point he would aspire to become equal with the Russians,
to be indistinguishable from them. And so: You might not hear the word Jew
for years on end. Perhaps, many have even forgotten that you are a Jew. Yet you
can never forget it yourself. It is this silence that always reminds you who you
are. It creates such an explosive tension inside you, that when you do hear the
word Jew, it sounds like fates blow. This is a very telling account. The same
author describes the cost of this transformation into a Russian. He had left
behind too much and become spiritually impoverished. Now, when he needs
those capacious, rich and flexible words, he cant find them.When he looks
for but cant find the right word, something dies inside him, he had lost the

2982Ya. Voronel. U kazhdogo svoi dom [Everyone Has a Home]. // 22, 1978, (2), p. 150-
151.
2983I. Domalsky. Tekhnologiya nenavisti [The Technology of Hate]. // EW. Tel Aviv, 1978,
(25), p. 129.
2984D. Shturman. Razmyshleniya nad rukopisyu [Mulling over the Manuscript]. // 22, 1980,
812), p. 133.
2985Aleksandr Galich. Pesni. Stikhi. Poemy. Kinopovest. Piesa. Statii [Songs. Verses. Poems.
Movie-essay. Piece. Essays]. Ekaterinburg, U-Faktoriya, 1998, p.586.
melodic intonation of Jewish speech with all its gaiety, playfulness, mirth,
tenacity, and irony.2986
Of course, these exquisite feelings did not worry each Soviet Jew; it was
the lot of the tiniest minority among them, the top cultural stratum, those who
genuinely and persistently tried to identify with Russians. It was them who G.
Pomeranz spoke about (though he made a generalization for the whole
intelligentsia): Everywhere, we are not quite out of place. Everywhere, we are
not quite in our place; we have become something like non-Israeli Jews, the
people of the air, who lost all their roots in their mundane existence.2987
Very well put.
A. Voronel develops the same theme: I clearly see all the sham of their
[Jews] existence in Russia today.2988
If theres no merging, there will always be alienation.
Nathan Sharansky often mentioned that from a certain point he started to
feel being different from the others in Russia.
During the DymshitsKuznetsov hijacking affair trial in December 1970, L.
Hnoh openly stated what he had apparently nurtured for quite a while: It
became unbearable for me to live in a country I dont regard as my own.
What integrity of mind and courage of word!
So it was this feeling that grew among the Soviet Jews, and now
increasingly among the broad Jewish masses.
Later, in 1982, another Jewish journalist put it like thus: I am a stranger. I
am a stranger in my own country which I love abstractly but fear in reality.2989
In the beginning of the 1970s, in a conversation with L.K. Chukovskaya
she told me (I made a note at the time): This Exodus was forced on Jewry. I
pity those whom the Russians made feel Jewish. The Soviet Jews have already
lost their sense of Jewishness and I consider this artificial awakening of their
national sense to be specious.
This was far from the truth. Despite the fact that she socialized with many
Jews from both capitals, Chukovskaya was mistaken. This Jewish national
awakening was not artificial or forced; it was an absolutely natural and even
necessary milestone of Jewish history. It was the sudden realization that one
can say Jew proudly!2990
Another Jewish publicist reflected on the experience of his generation of
young people in the USSR: So what are we the grandchildren and heirs of
that cruel experiment, who broke through the shell and hatched here in Israel
what are we to say about our fathers and grandfathers? Should we blame them

2986Rani Aren. V russkom galute [In the Russian Galuth]. // 22, 1981, (19), p. 133-135, 137.
2987G. Pomerantz. Chelovek niotkuda [A Man from Nowhere]. From G. Pomerantz,
Unpublished. Frankfurt: Posev, 1972, p. 161, 166.
2988A. Voronel. Trepet iudeiskikh zabot [The Thrills of Jewish Worries]. 2nd Edition, Ramat-
Gahn: Moscow-Jerusalem, 1981, p. 122.
2989M. Deich. Zapiski postoronnego [Notes of an outsider] // 22, 1982, (26), p. 156.
2990R. Rutman. Ukhodyashchemu poklon, ostayushchemusya bratstvo [Farewell to those
who leaves, brotherhood to those who stay]. // The New Journal, 1973, (112), p. 286.
that they didnt raise us in Jewish way? Yet our very sense of Jewishness was in
great part the result of their (as well as our) failures, catastrophes and despair.
So let us appreciate this past. Is it up to us to throw stones at the shattered
skulls of the romantics of yesterday?2991
This sincerely and honestly expressed intergenerational connection to the
fathers and grandfathers, who were so enthusiastic in the early Soviet years,
greatly supplements the whole picture. (You can read between the lines the
authors rejection of the benefits and advantages of the new class that has
replaced those romantics.)
A Samizdat article properly pointed out: The opinion that the current rise
in Jewish ethnic consciousness among assimilated Soviet Jews is just a reaction
to the re-emergence of anti-Semitism seems deeply mistaken. What we have
here is more likely a coincidence.2992
Different contemporaries described the development of their Jewish self-
identification somewhat differently. Some wrote that nearly everyone agreed
that nothing was happening in the 1960s in the sense of national revival,
though after the war of 1967 things began to change. Yet it was the plane
hijacking incident that led to the breakthrough. 2993 Others suggest that Jewish
groups were already forming in the mid-1960s in Leningrad, Moscow, and
Riga, and that by the end of the decade a Jewish underground center was
established in Leningrad. Yet what kind of conspiracy could it be? Makeshift
centers to study Hebrew and Jewish history were formed and not really for
study of Hebrew, but rather for the socialization of people who wished to study
it. Actual language usually was learnt not beyond two to three hundred words.
As a rule, all participants were state functionaries, and, like their entire milieu,
far removed from the Jewish religion and national traditions alike. The Jews
of the 1960s had only a vague conception of Zionism. And yet, we felt
ourselves to be sufficiently Jewish, and saw no need whatsoever for any sort of
additional Jewish educational remedy. In response to the barrage of anti-
Israeli propaganda, the inner sympathy towards Jewry and to Israel grew.
Even if we were told then that Israel had abandoned Judaism, it would make
no difference for us. And then the movement began to transform from an
underground to a mass, open parlour phenomenon. Still, then nobody
believed in the possibility of emigration, at least in our time, yet everyone
considered a quite real possibility of ending up in a camp. 2994 (The interviewer
comments: Alas, it is too short a step from conspiracy to devilry. I saw this in
the Jewish movement of the 1970s, after the trials in Leningrad.)2995

2991V. Boguslavsky. V zashchitu Kunyaeva [In Defence of Kunyaev]. // 22, 1980, (16), p.
176.
2992N. Ilsky. Istoriya i samosoznanie [The History and Consciousness]. // The Jews in the
USSR, 1977, (15): citation from 22, 1978, (1), p. 202.
2993A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation]. Interview. // 22, 1986, (47), p.
124.
2994V. Boguslavsky. U istokov [At the Origins]. Interview. // 22, 1986, (47), p. 102, 105-108.
2995Ibid., p. 109.
 Thus, the return to Jewish culture started and continued without counting
on emigration and initially did not affect the everyday life of the participants.
Im not sure that Aliyah [return to Israel] began because of Zionists, as those
first Zionist groups were too weak for this. To a certain extent, it was the
Soviet government that triggered the process by raising a tremendous noise
around the Six-Day War. The Soviet press painted the image of a warlike
invincible Jew, and this image successfully offset the inferiority complex of the
Soviet Jews.2996
But hide your Judaic terror from your co-workers eyes, from your
neighbors ears! At first, there was a deep fear: these scraps of paper, bearing
your contact details, were as if you were signing a sentence for yourself, for
your children, for your relatives. Yet soon we ceased whispering, we began to
speak aloud, to prepare and celebrate the Jewish holidays and study history
and Hebrew. And already from the end of 1969 the Jews by the tens and
hundreds began signing open letters to the public abroad. They demanded to
be released to Israel.2997 Soviet Jewry, separated from world Jewry, trapped
in the melting pot of the despotic Stalinist empire was seemingly
irredeemably lost for Jewry and yet suddenly the Zionist movement was
reborn and the ancient Moses appeal trumpeted again: Let my people go!2998
In 1970 the whole world began to talk about Russian Jews. They rose,
they became determined.There is only one barrier separating them from their
dream the barrier of governmental prohibition. To break through, to breech it,
to fly through it was their only wish. Flee from Northern Babylon! was the
behest of the arrested plane hijackers, the group led by E. Kuznetsov and M.
Dymshits.2999 In December 1970 during their trial in Leningrad they werent
silent, they didnt evade, they openly declared that they wanted to steal a plane
to fly it across the border to Israel. Remember, they faced the death sentence!
Their confessions were in essence the declarations of Zionism.3000 A few
months later in May 1971, there was a trial of the Zionist organizations of
Leningrad, soon followed by similar trials in Riga and Kishinev.
These trials, especially the two Leningrad trials, became the new powerful
stimulus for the development of the Jewish ethnic consciousness. A new
Samizdat journal, The Jews in the USSR, began to circulate soon afterwards, in
October 1972. It vividly reported on the struggle for the legalization of
emigration to Israel and covered the struggle for the right to freely develop
Jewish culture in the USSR.

2996V. Boguslavsky. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // 22,
1982, (24), p. 113.
2997V. Boguslavsky. Otsy i deti russkoi alii [Fathers and Children of Russian Aliyah]. // 22,
1978, (2), p. 176-177.
2998I. Oren. Ispoved [Confession] // 22, 1979, (7), p. 140.
2999V. Boguslavsky. Otsy i deti russkoi alii [Fathers and Children of Russian Aliyah]. // 22,
1978, (2), p. 177-178.
3000V. Boguslavsky. U istokov [At the Origins]. Interview. // 22, 1986, (47), p. 121.
 But even at this point only a minority of Jews were involved in the nascent
emigration movement. It seems that the life was easier for the Soviet Jews
when they knew that they had no choice, that they only could persevere and
adapt, than now, when theyve got a choice of where to live and what to do.
The first wave that fled from Russia at the end of the 1960s was motivated only
by the goal of spending the rest of their lives in the only country without anti-
Semitism, Israel.3001 (As the author noted, this does not include those who
emigrated for personal enrichment.)
And a part of Soviet Jewry would happily repudiate their national identity,
if they were allowed to do so.3002 so scared they were. This section included
those Jews who cursed that Israel, claiming that it is because of Israel that
law-abiding Jews are often being prevented from career advancement: because
of those leaving, we too will suffer.
The Soviet government could not but be alarmed by this unexpected (for
them as for the whole world) awakening of ethnic consciousness among Soviet
Jews. It stepped up propaganda efforts against Israel and Zionism, to scare away
the newly conscious. In March 1970 it made use of that well-worn Soviet trick,
to get the denunciation from the mouths of the people themselves, in this case
from the people of Jewish nationality. So the authorities staged a denunciatory
public press-conference and it was dutifully attended not only by the most
hypocritical official Jews such as Vergelis, Dragunsky, Chakovsky,
Bezymensky, Dolmatovsky, the film director Donsky, the propagandists Mitin
and Mintz, but also by prominent people who could easily refuse to participate
in the spectacle and in signing the Declaration without significant
repercussions for themselves. Among the latter were: Byalik: the members of
Academy, Frumkin and Kassirsky: the internationally renowned musicians,
Fliyer and Zak; the actors, Plisetskaya, Bystritskaya, and Pluchek. But sign it
they did. The Declaration heaped scorn on the aggression carried by the
Israeli ruling circles which resurrects the barbarism of the Hitlerites;
Zionism has always been an expression of the chauvinist views of the Jewish
bourgeois and its Jewish raving; and the signatories intend to open the eyes of
the gullible victims of Zionist propaganda: under the guidance of the Leninist
party, working Jews have gained full freedom from the hated Tsarism.
Amazing, see who was the real oppressor? The one already dead for half a
century!
But times had changed by this point. The official Jews were publicly
rebuked by I. Zilberberg, a young engineer who had decided to irrevocably cut
ties with this country and leave. He circulated an open letter in response to the
Declaration in Samizdat, calling its signatories lackey souls, and repudiated
his former faith in communism: we naively placed our hopes in our Jews

3001G. Fain. V roli vysokooplachivaemykh shveitzarov [In the Role of Highly Paid
Doorkeepers]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (12), p. 135.
3002I. Domalsky. Tekhnologiya nenavisti [The Technology of Hate]. // EW. Tel Aviv, 1978,
(25), p. 106.
the Kaganovichs, the Erenburgs, etc. (So, after all, they had once indeed placed
their hopes there?) At the same time he criticised Russians: after the 1950s, did
Russians repent and were they contrite and, after spilling a meagre few tears
about the past did they swear love and commitment to their new-found
brothers? In his mind there was no doubt that Russian guilt Jews was entirely
one-sided.
Such events continued. Another Samizdat open letter became famous a year
later, this one by the hitherto successful film director Mikhail Kalik, who had
now been expelled from the Union of Soviet film-makers because he declared
his intention to leave for Israel. Kalik unexpectedly addressed a letter about his
loyalty to Jewish culture to the Russian intelligentsia. It looked as if he had
spent his life in the USSR not among the successful, but had suffered for years
among the oppressed, striving for freedom. And now, leaving, he lectured this
sluggish Russian intelligentsia from the moral high ground of his victimhood.
So you will stay with your silence, with your obedient enthusiasm? Who
then will take care for the moral health of the nation, the country, the society?
Six months later there was another open letter, this time from the Soviet
writer Grigory Svirsky. He was driven to this by the fact that he hadnt been
published for several years and even his name had been removed from the
Encyclopaedia of Literature in punishment for speaking out against anti-
Semitism at the Central Literary House in 1968. This punishment he termed
murder, with understandable fire, though he forgot to glance back and to see
how many others suffered in this regard. I do not know how to live from now
on, he wrote to the Union of Writers. (This was a sentiment common to all
6,000 members of the union: they all believed that the government was bound
to feed them for their literary work). These were the reasons which made me, a
man of Russian culture, what is more a Russian writer and an expert on Russian
literature, feel myself to be a Jew and to come to the irrevocable decision to
leave with my family to Israel; I wish to become an Israeli writer. (But he
achieved no such transformation of his profession from one nation to another.
Svirsky, like many previous emigrants, had not realized how difficult he would
find adjusting to Israel, and chose to leave there too.)
The hostile anti-Russian feelings and claims we find in so many voices of
the awakened Jewish consciousness surprise and bewilder us, making our hearts
bleed. Yet in these feelings of the mature ferocity we do not hear any apology
proffered by our Jewish brothers for at least the events of 1920s. There isnt a
shadow of appreciation that Russians too are a wronged people. However, we
heard some other voices among the ferocious in the previous chapter. Looking
back on those times when they were already in Israel, they sometimes gave a
more sober account: we spent too much time settling debts with Russia in
Jews in the USSR at the expense even of devoting too little to Israel and our
life there and thinking too little about the future.3003

3003R. Nudelman. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // 22,
1982, (24), p. 141.
For the ordinary mundane and unarmed living, the prospect of breaking the steel
shell that had enveloped the USSR seemed an impossible and hopeless task. But
then they despaired and had to try and something gave! The struggle for the
right to emigrate to Israel was characterised throughout by both determination
and inventiveness: issuing complaints to the Supreme Soviet, demonstrations
and hunger strikes by the refuseniks (as Jews who had been refused exit to
Israel called themselves); seminars by fired Jewish professors on the pretext of
wanting to maintain their professional qualifications; the organization in
Moscow of an international symposium of scientists (at the end of 1976);
finally, refusal to undergo national service.
Of course, this struggle could only be successful with strong support from
Jewish communities abroad. For us the existence in the world of Jewish
solidarity was a startling discovery and the only glimmer of hope in that dark
time remembers one of the first refuseniks.3004 There was also substantial
material assistance: among refuseniks in Moscow there was born a particular
sort of independence, founded on powerful economic support from Jews
abroad.3005 And so they attached even more hopes to assistance from the West,
now expecting similarly powerful public and even political help.
This support had its first test in 1972. Somebody in the higher echelons of
the Soviet government reasoned as follows: here we have the Jewish
intelligentsia, educated for free in the Soviet system and then provided with
opportunities to pursue their academic careers, and now they just leave for
abroad to work there with all these benefits subsidized by the Soviet state.
Would it not be just to institute a tax on this? Why should the country prepare
for free educated specialists, taking up the places loyal citizens might have had,
only to have them use their skills in other countries? And so they started to
prepare a law to institute this tax. This plan was no secret, and quickly became
known and widely discussed in Jewish circles. It became law on August 3, 1972
in the Order of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR On the
compensation by citizens of the USSR, who are leaving to permanently live
abroad, of the government expenditure on their education. The amount
proscribed was between 3,600 and 9,800 roubles, depending on the rank of the
university (3,600 was in those days the yearly salary of an ordinary senior
researcher without a doctorate).
A storm of international indignation erupted. During the 55 years of its
existence, none of the monstrous list of the USSRs crimes had caused as united
an international protest as this tax on educated emigrants. American academics,
5,000 in number, signed a protest (Autumn 1972); and two thirds of American
senators worked together to stop an expected favorable trade agreement with the
USSR. European parliamentarians behaved similarly. For their part, 500 Soviet
Jews sent an open letter to UN General Secretary Kurt Waldheim (nobody yet

3004N. Rubinshtein. Kto chitatel? [Who is the Reader?] // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (7), p. 131.
3005E. Manevich. Letter to the editor. // EW, New York, 1985, (85), p. 230-231.
suspected that he too would soon be damned) describing: serfdom for those
with a higher education. (In reaching for a phrase they failed to realize how
this would sound in a country which had genuine kolkhoz serfdom).
The Soviet government buckled, and consigned the order to the scrapheap.
As to the agreement on trade? In April 1973, union leader George Meany
argued that the agreement was neither in the interest of the USA nor would it
ease international tensions, but the senators were concerned only about Soviet
Jews and ignored these arguments. They passed the agreement but adding the
Jackson amendment, which stated that it would only be agreed to once Jews
were allowed to leave the USSR freely. And so the whole world heard the
message coming from the American capital: we will help the Soviet government
if they release from their country, not everyone, but specifically and only Jews.
Nobody declared loud and clear: gentlemen, for 55 years it has been but a
dream to escape from under the hated Soviet regime, not for hundreds of
thousands but for millions of our fellow citizens; but nobody, ever had the right
to leave. And yet the political and social leaders of the West never showed
surprise, never protested, never moved to punish the Soviet government with
trade restrictions. (There was one unsuccessful attempt in 1931 to organise a
campaign against Soviet dumping of lumber, a practise made possible only by
the use of cheap convict labour, but even this campaign was apparently
motivated by commercial competition). 15 million peasants were destroyed in
the dekulakisation, 6 million peasants were starved to death in 1932, not even
to mention the mass executions and millions who died in the camps; and at the
same time it was fine to politely sign agreements with Soviet leaders, to lend
them money, to shake their honest hands, to seek their support, and to boast of
all this in front of your parliaments. But once it was specifically Jews that
became the target, then a spark of sympathy ran through the West and it became
clear just what sort of regime this was. (In 1972 I made a note on a scrap of
paper: Youve realized [whats going on], thank God. But for how long will
your realisation last? All it takes is for the problems Jews had with emigrating
to be resolved, and youll become deaf, blind and uncomprehending again to the
entirety of what is going on, to the problems of Russia and of communism.)
You cannot imagine the enthusiasm with which it [the Jackson
amendment] was met by Jews in Russia. Finally a lever strong enough to
shift the powers in the USSR is discovered. 3006 Yet suddenly in 1975 the
Jackson amendment became an irrelevance, as the Soviet government
unexpectedly turned down the offer of the trade agreement with the US. (Or it
rather calculated that it could get more advantages from other competing
countries).
The Soviet refusal made an impression on Jewish activists in the USSR and
abroad, but not for long. Both in America and Europe support for Jewish

3006V. Perelman. Krushenie chuda: prichiny i sledstviya. Beseda s G. Rosenblyumom [Collapse

of the Miracle: Causes and Consequences. Conversation with G. Rosenblum]. // EW, Tel
Aviv, 1977, (24), p. 128.
emigration out of the USSR became louder. The National Conference in
Defence of Soviet Jews. The Union on Solidarity with Soviet Jewry. The
Student Committee of Struggle for Soviet Jewry. On the Day of National
Solidarity with Soviet Jews more than 100,000 demonstrated in Manhattan,
including senators Jackson and Humphrey (both were running for the
Democratic nomination for President.) Hundreds different protests took
place. The largest of these were the yearly Solidarity Sundays
demonstrations and rallies in New York which were attended by up to 250,000
people (these ran from 1974-1987).3007 A three day meeting of 18 Nobel
laureates in support of the Corresponding Member of Academy Levich took
place in Oxford. Another 650 academics from across the world gave their
support and Levich was allowed to emigrate. In January 1978 more than a
hundred American academics sent a telegram to Brezhnev demanding that he
allow professor Meiman to go abroad. Another worldwide campaign ended in
another success: the mathematician Chudnovsky received permission to leave
for a medical procedure unavailable in the USSR. It was not just the famous:
often a name until then unheard of would be trumpeted across the world and
then returned to obscurity. For example, we heard it especially loudly in May
1978, when the world press told us a heart-rending story: a seven year old
Moscow girl Jessica Katz had an incurable illness, and her parents were not
allowed to go to the States! A personal intervention from Senator Edward
Kennedy followed, and presto! Success! The press rejoiced. The main news on
every television channel broadcast the meeting at the airport, the tears of
happiness, the girl held aloft. The Russian Voice of America devoted a whole
broadcast to how Jessica Katz was saved (failing to notice that Russian families
with sick children still faced the same impenetrable wall). A medical
examination later showed that Jessica wasnt ill at all, and that her cunning
parents had fooled the whole world to ensure her leaving. (A fact acknowledged
through gritted teeth on the radio, and then buried. Who else would be forgiven
such a lie?) Similarly, the hunger strike of V. Borisov (December 1976) who had
already spent nine years in a mental asylum was reported by the Voice of
America no differently from the 15 days of imprisonment of Ilya Levin, and if
anything, more attention was given to the latter. All a few refuseniks had to do
was sign a declaration about their inability to leave the USSR and it was
immediately reported by the Freedom, Voice of America, the BBC and by the
other most important sources of mass information, so much so that it is hard
now to believe how loudly they were trumpeted.
Of course it has to be noted that all the pomp surrounding the appearance of
a Soviet Jewish movement served to awaken among worldwide Jewry,
including those in America, an exciting conception of themselves as a nation.
Prophetic obsession of the first Zionists in the USSR induced exulting
sympathy among the Western Jews. The Western Jews saw their own ideals in

3007Kratkaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforthSJE)].

Jerusalem, 1996. v. 8, p. 380.
action. They began to believe in Russian Jews that meant for them believing
in their own best qualities. All that which Western Jews wanted to see around
themselves and didnt see.3008 Others said, with a penetrating irony: The
offered product (an insurrectionary Jewish spirit) found a delighted buyer
(American Jews). Neither America, nor American Jews are at all interested in
Jews from the USSR in themselves. The product bought was precisely the spirit
of Jewish revolt. The Jews of America (and with them the Jews of London,
Amsterdam, Paris, etc.), whose sense of Jewishness had been excited by the
Six-Day War triumph saw the chance to participate. It was a comfortable
struggle that moreover did not involve any great exertion.3009
However, it cannot be denied that these inspirations both here and there
merged, and worked together to destabilise the walls of the steel shell of the old
Soviet Union.

It is the general opinion that mass Jewish emigration from the USSR began in
1971, when 13,000 people left (98% to Israel). It was 32,000 in 1972, 35,000 in
1973 (the proportion going to Israel varying from 85% to 100%).3010 However
these were for the most part not from the ethnically Russian areas, but from
Georgia and the Baltic. (A Jewish delegate to an international congress declared
that Georgia is a country without anti-Semitism; many Georgian Jews later
became disappointed with their move to Israel and wanted to go back). There
was no mass movement from the central part of the USSR. Later, when leaving
was made more difficult, some expressed a serious regret (R. Nudelman): the
tardy courage of future refuseniks might have, perhaps, been unnecessary if
they had taken advantage of the breech made when theyd had the chance.
Someone disagrees: But people need time to mature! See how long it took
before we understood that we must not stay, that it is simply a crime against
your own children.3011
Ho, ho, [come forth], and flee from the land of the north, saith the
LORD. (Zech 2:6)
Nonetheless, the excitement of Jewish emigration took root in Russian and
Ukrainian towns too. By March 1973, 700,000 requests to emigrate had been
registered. However, autumn 1973 saw the Yom Kippur War, and the desire of
many to emigrate suddenly diminished. Israels image changed sharply after
the Yom Kippur War. Instead of a secure and brave rich country, with
confidence in tomorrow and a united leadership, Israel unexpectedly appeared
3008A. Voronel. Vmesto poslesloviya [Instead of Afterword]. // 22, 1983, (31), p. 140.
3009V. Boguslavsky. Oni nichego ne ponyali [They still dont get it]. // 22, 1984, (38), p.
156.
3010F. Kolker. Novy plan pomoshchi sovetskomu evreistvu [A New Plan for Assistance to the
Soviet Jewry]. // 22, 1983, (31), p. 144.
3011Yu. Shtern. Situatsia neustoichiva i potomu opasna [The Situation is Unstable and
Therefore Dangerous]. Interview. // 22, 1984, (38), p. 132, 133.
before the world as confused, flabby, ripped apart by internal contradictions.
The standard of living of the population fell sharply.3012
As a result only 20,000 Jews left the USSR in 1974. In 1975-76, up to
50% of emigrating Soviet Jews once in the stopover point of Vienna went
past Israel. This period saw the birth of the term directists that is to say
those who went directly to the United States.3013 After 1977, their numbers
varied from 70 to 98 percent.3014
Frankly, this is understandable. The Jewish state had been conceived as a
national refuge for Jews of the whole world, the refuge which, to begin with,
guarantees them a safe existence. But this did not transpire. The country was in
the line of fire for many years.3015
What is more it soon became clear that Israel needed not intellectual
Soviet Jews but a national Jewish intelligentsia. At this point thinking
Jews realised with a horror that in the way they had defined themselves their
whole life they had no place in Israel, because as it turned out for Israel you
had to be immersed in Jewish national culture and so only then the arrivals
realised their tragic mistake: there had been no point to leaving Russia 3016
(although this was also due to the loss of social position) and letters back
warned those who hadnt left yet of this. Their tone and content at that time
was almost universally negative. Israel was presented as a country where the
government intervenes in and seeks to act paternally in all aspects of a citizens
life.3017 A prejudice against emigration to Israel began to form among many as
early as the mid-1970s.3018 The firm opinion of Israel that the Moscow and
Leningrad intelligentsia began to acquire was of a closed, spiritually
impoverished society, buried in its own narrow national problems and letting
todays ideological demands have control over the culture. At best it is a
cultural backwater, at worst yet another totalitarian government, lacking only
a coercive apparatus.3019 Many Soviet Jews gained the impression, not without
reason, that in leaving the USSR for Israel they were exchanging one
authoritarian regime for another.3020
3012E. Manevich. Novaya emigratsiya: slukhi i realnost [New Emigration: the Rumors and
Reality] . // EW, New York, 1985, (87), p. 107-108.
3013F. Kolker. Novy plan pomoshchi sovetskomu evreistvu [A New Plan for Assistance to the
Soviet Jewry]. // 22, 1983, (31), p. 144.
3014V. Perelman. Oglyanis v somnenii [Look Back in Doubt]. // EW, New York, 1982, (66), p.
152.
3015S. Tsirulnikov. Izrail god 1986 [Israel, the Year of 1986] . // EW, New York, 1986, (88),
p. 135.
3016G. Fain. V roli vysokooplachivaemykh shveitzarov [In the Role of Highly Paid
Doorkeepers]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (12), p. 135-136.
3017E. Manevich. Novaya emigratsiya: slukhi i realnost [New Emigration: the Rumors and
Reality] . // EW, New York, 1985, (87), p. 111.
3018E. Finkelshtein. Most, kotory rukhnul [The Bridge that Had Collapsed]. // 22, 1984,
(38), p. 148.
3019E. Sotnikova. Letter to Editor. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1978, (25), p. 214.
3020M. Nudler. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // 22,
1982, (24), p. 138.
 When in 1972-73 more than 30,000 Soviet Jews had left for Israel per year,
Golda Meir used to meet them personally at the airport and wept, and the Israeli
press called their mass arrivals the Miracle of the 20th century. Back then
everyone left for Israel. Those who took the road to Rome, that is to say not to
Israel, were pointed out. But then the number of arrivals started to fall from
year to year. It decreased from tens of thousands to thousands, from thousands
to hundreds, from hundreds to a few lone individuals. In Vienna, it was no
longer those taking the road to Rome [the next stop on the road to the final
desired destination, usually the U.S.] who were pointed out, it was those
loners, those clowns, those nuts, who still left for Israel. 3021 Back then
Israel used to be the norm and you had to explain why you were going past it,
but it was the other way round now: it was those planning to leave for Israel that
often had to explain their decision.3022
Only the first wave was idealistic; starting with 1974, so to speak the
second echelon of Jews began to leave the USSR, and for those Israel might
have been attractive, but mainly from a distance. 3023 Anothers consideration:
Perhaps the phenomenon of neshira [neshira dispersal on the way to Israel;
noshrim the dispersed ones] is somehow connected to the fact that initial
emigration used to be from the hinterlands [of the USSR], where [Jewish]
traditions were strong, and now its more from the centre, where Jews have
substantially sundered themselves from their traditions.3024
Anyway, the more open were the doors into Israel, the less Jewish was the
efflux, the majority of activists barely knowing the Hebrew alphabet. 3025 Not
to find their Jewishness, but to get rid of it was now the main reason for
emigration.3026 They joked in Israel that the world has not been filled with the
clatter of Jewish feet running to settle in their own home. Subsequent waves
quickly took into account the mistake of the vanguard, and instead
enthusiastically leapt en masse to where others hands had already built their
own life. En masse, it should be noted, for here finally was that much spoken of
Jewish unity.3027 But of course these people left the USSR in search of
intellectual freedom, and so must live in Germany or England or more simply
in the United States.3028 And a popular excuse was that the Diaspora is needed as
somebody has to give money to resource-less Israel and to make noise when it

3021V. Perelman. Letter to Editor. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1977, (23), p. 217.
3022Yu. Shtern. Dvoinaya otvetstvennost [Dual Liability]. Interview // 22, 1981, (21), p. 126.
3023E. Manevich. Novaya emigratsiya: slukhi i realnost [New Emigration: the Rumors and
Reality]. // EW, New York, 1985, (87), p. 109-110.
3024G. Freiman. Dialog ob alie i emigratsii [The Dialog (with Voronel) on Aliyah and
Emigration]. // 22, 1983, (31), p. 119.
3025A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation] Interview // 22, 1986, (47), p. 126
3026B. Orlov. Puti-dorogi rimskikh piligrimov [The Ways and Roads of Roman
Pilgrims] // EW, Tel Aviv, 1977, (14), p. 126.
3027A. Voronel. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // 22,
1982, (24), p. 117-118.
3028E. Levin. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // 22, 1982,
(24), p. 127.
is being bullied! But on the other hand, the Diaspora perpetuates anti-
Semitism.3029
A. Voronel made a broader point here: The situation of Russian Jews and
the problem of their liberation is a reflection of the all-Jewish crisis. The
problems of Soviet Jews help us to see the disarray in our own ranks; the
cynicism of Soviet Jews in using calls from made up relatives in Israel instead
of accepting their fate, the Way of Honour, is nothing more than a reflection of
the cynicism and the rot affecting the whole Jewish (and non-Jewish) world;
questions of conscience move further and further into background under the
influence of the business, the competition and the unlimited possibilities of the
Free World.3030
So its all quite simple it was just a mass escape from the harsh Soviet life
to the easy Western one, quite understandable on a human level. But then whats
about repatriation? And what is the spiritual superiority of those who dared
to leave over those who stayed in the country of slaves? In fighting in those
days for emigration Soviet Jews loudly demanded: Let my people go! But that
was a truncated quote. The Bible said: Let my people go, that they may hold a
feast unto me in the wilderness. (Ex. 5:1) Yet somehow too many of those
released went not into the desert, but to the abundance of America.

Can we nonetheless say that in the early years of sudden and successful
emigration to Israel, it was the Zionists beliefs and ambitions that acted as the
prime stimulus for Jews to leave? The testimony of various Jewish writers
would suggest not.
The Soviet situation of the end of the 1960s was one of Aliyah, not of a
Zionist movement. There were many people psychologically ready to flee the
USSR. What can be called a Zionist movement was entirely subsidiary to this
group of people.3031 Those who joined makeshift centres dedicated to the actual
study of Jewish history and culture were mostly characterised by a complete
lack of the careerism so common among the Soviet-Jewish intelligentsia. This
was why they dedicated the entirety of their free time to Jewish affairs. 3032 For
them the era of the Hebrew teachers had started even as early as the end of the
1970s, and by the beginning of the 1980s these Torah teachers were the only
ones who still influenced the minds.3033
The motives of many others who emigrated are explained as follows: The
Soviet government has placed obstacles in the way of achieving the most
3029A. Dobrovich. Letter to Editor. // 22, 1989, (67), p. 218.
3030A. Voronel. Vmesto poslesloviya [Instead of Afterword]. // 22, 1983, (31), p. 139-141.
3031V. Boguslavsky. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // 22,
1982, (24), p. 139.
3032V. Boguslavsky. U istokov [At the Origins]. Interview. // 22, 1986, (47), p. 105.
3033A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation]. Interview // 22, 1986, (47), p.
136-140.
important things professional advancement, and so Jewry is in danger of
degradation.3034 They were driven into Jewishness, and then into Zionism
by their faceless bureaucratic nemesis.3035 Many had never encountered
anti-Semitism or political persecution. What burdened them was the dead end
that their lives as Soviet Jews had become as bearers of a contradiction from
which they could free themselves neither by assimilation nor by their
Jewishness3036 There was a growing sense of incompatibility and sorrow;
dozens and dozens of dolts are dragging you into insignificance are
pushing you to the bottom.3037 So came the longing to escape the Soviet Union.
This bright hope, when a man under the complete control of the Soviet
government could in three months become free was genuinely
exhilarating.3038
Of course, a complex emotional environment developed around the act of
departure. A writer says: the majority of Soviet Jews are using the same
Zionist door they sadly leave that familiar, that tolerant Russia (a slip, but
one that is closer to the truth, as the author had meant to say tolerated by
Jews).3039 Or said thusly: The vast majority decided to emigrate with their
heads, while their insides, that is to say concern with being part of a country
and its traditions, were against.3040 No one can judge to what extent this was a
majority. But as weve seen the mood varied from the good poetry of Liya
Vladimorova:
But for you my beloved, for you the proud,
I bequest the memories and the departure
to the then-popular joke: Could the last person to leave please turn off the
lights.
This growing desire to emigrate among Soviet Jews coincided with the
beginning of the dissident movement in the USSR. These developments were
not entirely independent: for some of them [Jewish intellectuals] Jewish
ethnic consciousness in the USSR was a new vector of intellectual
development a new form of heterodoxy,3041 and they regarded their own
impatient escape from the country as also a desperately important political
cause. In essence, the dilemma facing the Zionists at the start of the 20th
century was repeated: if it is your aim to leave Russia, should you at the same
time maintain a political struggle within it? Back then, most had answered yes
3034A. Voronel. Dialog ob alie i emigratsii [The Dialog (with G. Freiman) on Aliyah and
Emigration]. // 22, 1983, (31), p. 119.
3035Lev Kopelev. O pravde i terpimosti [On Truth and Tolerance]. New York: Khronika Press,
1982, . 61.
3036Editorial. (R. Nudelman] // 22, 1979, (7), p. 97.
3037E. Angenits. Spusk v bezdnu [Descend into Abyss]. // 22, 1980, (15), p. 166, 167.
3038A. Eterman. Tretye pokolenie [The Third Generation] Interview // 22, 1986, (47), p. 125.
3039V. Boguslavsky. V zashchitu Kunyaeva [In Defence of Kunyaev]. // 22, 1980, (16), p.
175.
3040V. Lyubarsky. Chto delat, a ne kto vinovat [The Question Is Not Who Is Guilty, But What
to Do]. // EW, New York, 1990, (109), p. 129.
3041B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [The New Russia]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 143.
to the struggle; now, most answered no. But an increasingly daredevil attitude
to emigration could not but feed a similarly daredevil attitude to politics, and
sometimes the daredevils were one and the same. So for example (in 1976)
several activists in the Jewish movement V. Rubin, A. Sharansky, V. Slepak
together made an independent decision to support the Helsinki Group of
dissidents, but this was regarded in Jewish circles as an unjustifiable and
unreasonable risk, as it would lead to the immediate and total escalation of
the governments repression of Jewish activism, and would moreover turn the
Jewish movement into the property of dissidents.3042
On the other side, many dissidents took advantage of the synchronicity of
the two movements, and used emigration as a means of escape from their
political battlefield for their own safety. They found theoretical justifications for
this: Any honest man in the USSR is an eternal debtor to Israel, and here is
why. The emigration breech was made in the iron curtain thanks to Israel
it protects the rear of those few people willing to oppose the tyranny of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] and to fight for human rights in
the USSR. The absence of this emergency exit would be deadly to the current
democratic movement.3043
It has to be admitted that this is a very cynical justification, and that it says
little good of the dissident movement as a whole. A hostile critic then noted:
these opponents [of the CPSU] are playing an odd game: they become
involved in the democratic movement, already sure of an emergency exit for
themselves. But by this they demonstrate the temporary and inconsequential
character of their activity. Do potential emigrants have the right to speak of
changing Russia, or especially on behalf of Russia?3044
One dissident science fiction author (and later, after emigration, a Russian
Orthodox priest) suggested this formulation, that Jewish emigration creates a
revolution in the mind of Soviet man; the Jews, in fighting for the right to
leave, become transformed into fighters for freedom in general.The Jewish
movement serves as a social gland that begins to secrete the hormones of rights
awareness; it has become a sort of ferment perpetuating dissidence. Russia
is becoming deserted, that abroad, so mythical before, is becoming
populated by our own people, the Jewish Exodus is gradually leading
totalitarian Soviet Moscow to the plains of freedom.3045
This view was readily accepted and in the coming years came to be loudly
trumpeted: the right to emigrate is the primary human right. It was repeated
often and in unison that this was an enforced escape, and talk about the
privileged position Jews occupy with regards to emigration is slander.3046

3042V. Lazaris. Ironicheskaya pesenka [Ironic Song]. // 22, 1978, (2), p. 207.
3043I. Melchuk. Letter to Editor // EW, Tel Aviv, 1977, (23), p. 213-214.
3044V. Lazaris. Ironicheskaya pesenka [Ironic Song]. // 22, 1978, (2), p. 200.
3045M. Aksenov-Meerson. Evreiskii iskhod v rossiiskoi perspective [The Jewish Exodus from
Russian Point of View]. // EW, Tel Aviv, 1979, (41).
3046G. Sukharevskaya. Letter to Editor. // Seven Days, New York, 1984, (51).
 Yes, taking a lifeboat from a sinking ship is indeed an act of necessity. But
to own a lifeboat is a great privilege, and after the gruelling ordeals of half a
century in the USSR Jews owned one, while the rest did not. Those more
perceptive expressed a more conscientious feeling: It is fine to fight for the
repatriation of Jews, it is understandable, and it is fine to fight for the right to
emigrate for everyone that too is understandable; but you cannot fight for the
right to emigrate but, for some reason, only for Jews.3047 Contrary to the self-
satisfied theoreticians of emigration, and their belief that it brought all Soviet
people closer to emigrating abroad and so partly freed them, in reality those
unable to emigrate came to feel more hopeless, to an even greater extent fooled
and enslaved. There were emigrants who understood this: What is cruellest
about this situation is that it is Jews who are leaving. It has bizarrely become a
question of something akin to a certificate of authenticity.3048
Precisely. But they chose to blind themselves to this.
What could the remaining residents of totalitarian Moscow think? There
was a great variety of responses, from grievance (You, Jews, are allowed to
leave and we arent) to the despair of intellectuals. L.K Chukovksaya
expressed it in conversation to me: Dozens of valuable people are leaving, and
as a result human bonds vital for the country are ripped apart. The knots that
hold together the fabric of culture are being undone.
To repeat the lesson: Russia is becoming deserted.
We can read the thoughtful comments of an emigrant Jewish author about
this Departure: Russian Jewry were pathfinders in their experiment to merge
with the Russian people and Russian culture, they became involved in Russias
fate and history, and, repulsed away as if by a similarly charged body, left.
(What an accurate and penetrating comparison!) What is most stunning about
this Departure is how, at the moment of greatest assimilation, voluntary it
was. The pathetic character of the Russian Aliyah of the 1970s was that
we were not exiled from the country on a kings order or by the decision of
party and parliament, and we were not fleeing to save ourselves from the whips
of an enraged popular pogrom this fact is not immediately obvious to the
participants in this historical event.3049
No doubt, the Jewish emigration from the USSR ushered in a great
historical shift. The beginning of the Exodus drew a line under an epoch lasting
two centuries of coerced co-existence between Jews and Russians. From that
point every Soviet Jew was free to choose for himself to live in Russia or
outside it. By the second half of the 1980s each was entirely free to leave for
Israel without struggle.
The events that took place over two centuries of Jewish life in Russia the
Pale of Settlement,the escape from its stultifying confines, the flowering, the
3047I. Shlomovich. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Behind and Think]. Panel discussion. // 22,
1982, (24), p. 138.
3048B. Khazanov. Novaya Rossiya [The New Russia] // EW, Tel Aviv, 1976, (8), p. 143.
3049B. Orlov. Ne te vy uchili alfavity [You Have Studied Wrong Alphabets]. // EW, Tel Aviv,
1975, (1), p. 127-128.
ascension to the ruling circles of Russia, then the new constraints, and finally
the Exodus none of these are random streams on the outskirts of history.
Jewry had completed its spread from its origin on the Mediterranean Sea to as
far away as Eastern Europe, and it was now returning back to its point of origin.
We can see in both this spread and in its reversal a supra-human design.
Perhaps those that come after us will have the opportunity to see it more clearly
and to solve its mystery.
 Chapter 27. About the assimilation

When and how did this extraordinary Jewish status of guests everywhere
begin? The conventional wisdom suggests that the centuries-old Jewish
diaspora should be dated from the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in AD70;
and that, after being thrown out of their native land, the Jews began wandering
around the world. However, it is not true because the great majority of the
Jews were already dispersed by that time; hardly more than one-eighth of the
nation lived in Palestine.3050 The Jewish Diaspora had begun much earlier:
The Jews were mainly a dispersed nation by the time of the Babylonian
captivity [6th century B.C.] and, possibly, even earlier; Palestine was only a
religious and, to certain extent, a cultural center.3051
Scattering of the Jews was already foretold in the Pentateuch. I will scatter
you among the nations (Leviticus 26:33). Yahweh will scatter you among the
peoples, and you shall be left few in number among the nations (Deuteronomy
4:27).
Only a small part of the Jews had returned from the [Babylonian]
captivity; many had remained in Babylon as they did not want to abandon their
property. Large settlements were established outside of Palestine; large
numbers of Jews concentrated in major trade and industrial centers of the
ancient world. (For example, in Alexandria under Ptolemaic dynasty, Jews
accounted for two-fifth of the population.) They were, mainly, traders and
craftsmen.3052 The Jewish-Hellenistic philosopher Philo Judaeus (who died in
the middle of the 1st century, 20 years before the destruction of the Temple)
states: [The Jews] regard the Holy City as their metropolis because the Holy
Temple of Almighty God is situated there, and they call homeland the
countries where they live, and where their fathers, grandfathers, great-
grandfathers and ancient forebears lived, and where they were born and brought
up.3053
Mikhail Gershenzon mused on the fates of the Jewish nation after the
Babylonian captivity: [The Jews] took roots in foreign lands and, contrary to
3050I.M. Bikerman. K samopoznaniyu evreya: Chem my byli, chem my stali, chem my dolzhny
byt [To the Self-Knowledge of a Jew: What We Were, What We Became, What We Must
Be]. Paris, 1939, p. 17.
3051S.Ya. Lurye. Antisemitizm v drevnem mire [Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World]. Tel-Aviv:
Sova, 1976, p. 160 [1st ed. Petrograd: Byloye, 1922].
3052Ibid.*, p. 64, 122, 159.
3053S.Ya. Lurye. Antisemitizm v drevnem mire* [Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World], p. 160.
expectations, didnt aspire to return to their old homeland. Just recall: the
Kingdom of Judah was still there, yet most of the Jews were already scattered
across the whole Middle East; the Second Temple still stood in all its splendor,
but the Language of the Bible was no longer heard on the streets and in the
houses of Jerusalem; everybody spoke either Syrian or Greek there. Even back
then the Jews were inclined to think: We should not hold dear our national
independence, we should learn to live without it, under foreign rule; we should
not become attached to a land or to a single language.3054
Modern Jewish authors agree: The Jews in the ancient world were
scattered and established large centers in the Diaspora even before the collapse
of Jewish nationhood.3055 The nation which was given the Law did not want to
return to its native country. There is some very profound and still not
understood meaning in it. It is much easier to chat about Jewish values and
about the preservation of Jewry than to explain the true reasons for such a long
Galut.3056 (Even in the mid-20th century the Hebrew language still had no word
for Diaspora as for the living in the voluntary scattering, there was only
Galut, referring to the forced exile.)
From the historical evidence we see that the scattering of the Jews was not
solely their unfortunate fate, but also a voluntary quest. Indeed, it was a
bemoaned disaster, but could it also be a method of making life easier? This is
an important question in attempting to understand the Diaspora.
The Jews still do not have a generally accepted view on the Diaspora,
whether it has been blessing for them or a bane.
Zionism, from the very moment of its birth, responded to this question
firmly (and fully in line with its essence): Our scattering is our biggest curse; it
brings us no good, and no advantages and no peace to others as well. We are
guests everywhere and we are still unwanted, everybody wants to get rid of
us.3057 To be a homeless man, feeling as a guest everywhere this is the true
curse of exile, its real bitterness! 3058 Some say that having several homes
improves chances to survive for the Jews. In my view, a nation staying in many

3054M. Gershenzon. Sudby evreyskogo naroda [The Destinies of the Jewish Nation] // 22:
Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v
Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in
Israel]. Tel-Aviv, 1981, (19), p. 109-110.
3055S. Tsiryulnikov. Filosofiya evreyskoy anomalii [Philosophy of the Jewish Anomaly] //
Vremya i my (daleye VM): Mezhdunarodny zhurnal literatury i obshchestvennykh
problem [Epoch and We (hereinafter EW): International Journal of Literature and Social
Problems]. New York, 1984, (77), p. 148.
3056A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // 22, 1982, (27), p. 158.
3057Max Brod. Lyubov na rasstoyanii [Love at the Distance] // TW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (11), p.
197-198.
3058Amos Oz. O vremeni i o sebe [On Time and on Me] // Kontinent: Literaturny,
obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i religiozny zhurnal [Continent: Literary, Social, Political
and Religious Journal]. Moscow, 1991, (66), p. 260.
others homes and not caring about its own cannot expect security. The
availability of many homes corrupts.3059
Yet the opposite opinion is even more prevalent, and it seems to be more
credible. Perhaps, the Jewish nation had survived and persevered not in spite
of its exile, but because of it; the Jewish Diaspora is not an episode, but the
organic ingredient of Jewish history.3060
Was the Jewish nation preserved in all its uniqueness in spite of the exile
and scattering or because of it? The tragedy of Jerusalem in AD70 destroyed the
state, yet it was necessary to save the people; the extraordinarily intensified
instinct of national self-preservation prompted Jews toward salvation through
Diaspora.3061 Jewry was never able to fully comprehend its situation and the
causes for it. They saw exile as the punishment for their sins, yet time and time
again it turned out to be the dispensation by which the Lord has distinguished
his nation. Through the Diaspora, the Jew worked out the mark of the Chosen
he foresaw on his brow. The scattered state of the nation is not unnatural for
him. Already in the periods of the most comfortable existence in their own
state, Jewry was stationing garrisons on its route and spearheading vanguards in
all directions, as if sensing its future dispersion and getting ready to retreat to
the positions it had prepared in advance. Thus, the Diaspora is a special form
of Jewish existence in space and time of this world. 3062 And look how
awesomely mobile are the Jews in Diaspora. The Jewish people never strike
root in one place, even after several generations.3063
But after they were so widely scattered and had become small minorities
among other nations, the Jews had to develop a clear position toward those
nations how to behave among them and how to relate to them, to seek
ultimate bonding and merging with those nations, or to reject them and separate
from them? The Holy Scripture contains quite a few covenants of isolation. The
Jews avoided even their closest kindred neighbors, the Samaritans and
Israelites, so irreconcilably that it was not permitted to even take a piece of
bread from them. Mixed marriages were very strictly forbidden. We will not
give our daughters to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our
sons. (Nehemiah 10:30) And Ezra had ordered them to dissolve even the
existing marriages, even those with children.
Thus, living in Diaspora for thousands of years, the Jews did not mix with
other nations, just as butter does not mix with water, but comes to the surface
and floats. During all those long centuries, they perceived themselves as
something distinct, and until the 18th century the Jews as a nation have never

3059A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // 22, 1982, (27), p. 159.
3060S. Tsiryulnikov. Filosofiya evreyskoy anomalii [Philosophy of the Jewish Anomaly] // EW,
New York, 1984, (77), p. 149-150.
3061P. Samorodnitskiy. Stranny narodets [Strange Little Nation] // 22, 1980, (15), p. 153,
154.
3062E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galut with Love] // 22, 1985, (40), p. 112-
114.
3063M. Shamir. Sto let voyny [One Hundred Years of War] // 22, 1982, (27), p. 167.
shown any inclination for assimilation. The pre-revolutionary Jewish
Encyclopedia, while quoting Marxs assertion that the Jews had not
assimilated, because they represented the highest economic class, that is the
class of capitalists amidst the agricultural and petty bourgeois nations, objects,
saying that the economy was secondary: the Jews of the Diaspora have
consciously established their own economy which protected them from
assimilation. They did it because they were conscious of their cultural
superiority, which, for its part, was created by the spiritual meaning of
Judaism in its most complete form. The latter protected them from
imitation.3064
But from the mid-18th century the Jews started to believe in assimilation,
and that becomes the ferment of decomposition of the Jewish nation in
Western Europe of the 19th century. Assimilation begins when the
surrounding culture reaches the height held by the Jewish culture, or when the
Jewry ceases to create new values. The national will of the European Jews was
weakened by the end of the 18th century; it had lost ground because of
extremely long waiting. Other nations began creating brilliant cultures that
eclipsed Jewish culture.3065 And exactly then Napoleon launched the Pan-
European emancipation; in one country after another, the roads to social
equality were opening before the Jews, and that facilitated assimilation. (There
is an important caveat here: There is no unilateral assimilation, and the
assimilating Jews supplemented the host cultures with Jewish national traits.
Heine and Brne, Ricardo and Marx, Beaconsfield-Disraeli and Lassalle,
Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn during their assimilation into the host cultures,
they added Jewish elements to them.3066)
In some cases, assimilation leads to a brighter creative personal self-
fulfillment. But, overall, assimilation was the price paid by the Jews for the
benefit of having access to the European culture. Educated Jews convinced
themselves that the Jews are not a nation, but only a religious group. 3067 The
Jewish nation, after it joined the realm of European nations, began to lose its
national uniqueness only the Jew from the ghetto retained pronounced
national traits while the intelligent Jew tried with all his strength to look
unlike a typical Jew. Thus spread the theory that there is no Jewish nation, but
only the Poles, Frenchmen and Germans of Mosaic Law.3068
3064Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya (daleye EE) [The Jewish Encyclopedia (hereinafter TJE)]:
16 volumes. Sankt-Petersburg.: Obshchestvo dlya Nauchnykh Evreyskikh Izdaniy i Izd-vo
Brokgauz-Efron [St. Petersburg: Society for Scientific Jewish Publications and Publisher
Brokgauz-Efron], 1906-1913. V. 3, p. 312.
3065Ibid., p. 313.
3066Ibid.
3067M. Krol. Natsionalizm i assimilyatsiya v evreyskoy istorii [Nationalism and Assimilation in
the Jewish History] // Evreyskiy mir: Ezhegodnik na 1939 g. (daleye EM-1) [The Jewish
World: Yearbook for 1939 (hereinafter JW-1)]. Paris: Obyedineniye russko-evreyskoy
intelligentsii [Association of Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia], p. 187.
3068I.L. Klauzner. Literatura na ivrite v Rossii [Literature in Hebrew in Russia] // Kniga o
russkom evreystve: Ot 1860-kh godov do Revolyutsii 1917 g. [Book on the Russian Jewry:
 Marx, and then Lenin saw the solution of Jewish question in the full
assimilation of the Jews in the countries of their residence.
In contrast to the clumsiness of those ideologues, the ideas of M.O.
Gershenzon are much more interesting. He put them forward late in life, in
1920, and they are all the more interesting because the lofty thinker Gershenzon
was a completely assimilated Russian Jew. Nevertheless, the Jewish question
was alive and well in his mind. He explored it in his article The Destinies of the
Jewish Nation.
Unlike the contemporary Jewish Encyclopedia, Gershenzon believes that
Jewish assimilation is the ancient phenomenon, from time immemorial. One
voice constantly tempted him [the Jew] to blend with the environment
hence comes this ineradicable and ancient Jewish aspiration to assimilate. Yet
another voice demanded above all things to preserve his national uniqueness.
The whole story of scattering is the never-ending struggle of two wills within
Jewry: the human will against the superhuman one, the individual against the
collective. The requirements of the national will towards the individual were
so ruthless and almost beyond human power, that without having a great hope
common to all Jewry, the Jew would succumb to despair every now and then,
and would be tempted to fall away from his brethren and desert that strange and
painful common cause. Contrary to the view that it is not difficult to explain
why assimilation began precisely at the end of the 18th century, Gershenzon is
rather surprised: Is it not strange that assimilation so unexpectedly accelerated
exactly during the last one hundred years and it continues to intensify with each
passing hour? Shouldnt the temptation to fall apart be diminished greatly
nowadays, when the Jews obtained equal rights everywhere? No, he replies: It
is not the external force that splits the Jews; Jewry disintegrates from the inside.
The main pillar of Jewry, the religious unity of the Jewish nation, is decayed
and rotten. So, what about assimilation, where does it lead to? At first sight, it
appears that [the Jews] are imbued, to the marrow of their bones, with the
cosmopolitan spirit or, at least, with the spirit of the local culture; they share
beliefs and fixations of the people around them. Yet it is not exactly like that:
They love the same things, but not in the same way. They indeed crave to
embrace the alien gods They strive to accept the way of life of modern
culture. They pretend that they already love all that truly love, and they are
even able to convince themselves of that. Alas! One can only love his own
faith, the one born in the throes from the depths of the soul.3069
Jewish authors genuinely express the spiritual torment experienced by the
assimilating Jew. If you decided to pretend that you are not a Jew, or to change
your religion, you are doomed to unending internal struggle with your Jewish
identity. You live in terrible tension. In a way, this is immoral, a sort of

From the 1860s until the 1917 Revolution]. New York: Soyuz Russkikh Evreyev [The
Union of Russian Jews], 1960, p. 506.
3069M. Gershenzon. Sudby evreyskogo naroda [The Destinies of the Jewish Nation] // 22,
1981, (19), p. 111-115.
spiritual self-violation.3070 (This inner conflict was amazingly described by
Chekhov in his essay Tumbleweed.) This evil stepmother assimilation
forced the individual to adapt to everything: to the meaning of life and human
relations, to demands and needs, to the way of life and habits. It crippled the
psychology of the nation in general and that of the national intelligentsia in
particular. It compelled people to renounce their own identity, and, ultimately,
led to self-destruction.3071 It is a painful and humiliating search of identity. 3072
But even the most complete assimilation is ephemeral: it never becomes
natural, it does not liberate from the need to be on guard all the time.3073
In addition to the lack of trust on the part of surrounding native people,
assimilating Jews come under fire from their fellow Jews; they are accused of
consumerism and conformism, of the desire to desert their people, to dispose
of their Jewish identity, and of the national defection.3074
Nevertheless, during the 19th century everything indicated that assimilation
was feasible and necessary, that it was predetermined and even inevitable. Yet
the emergence of Zionism cast a completely new light on this problem. Before
Zionism, every Jew suffered from painful duality, 3075 the dissonance between
the religious tradition and the surrounding external world.
In the early 20th century Jabotinsky wrote: When the Jew adopts a foreign
culture one should not trust the depth and strength of such conversion. The
assimilated Jew cannot withstand a single onslaught, he abandons the adopted
culture without any resistance whatsoever, as soon as he sees that the power of
that culture is over he cannot be the pillar for such a culture. He provided a
shining example of the Germanized Austria-Hungary, when, with the growth of
Czech, Hungarian and Polish cultures, Germanized Jews actively conformed to
new ways of life. It is all about certain hard realities of the natural relationship
between a man and his culture, the culture created by his ancestors.3076 This
observation is true, of course, though hard realities sounds somewhat dry.
(Jabotinsky not only objected to assimilation fiercely, he also insistently warned

3070N. Podgorets. Evreyi v sovremennom mire [The Jews in the Modern World]: [Interview] //
EM, New York, 1985, (86), p. 117.
3071V. Levitina. Stoilo li szhigat svoy khram. [Should We Really Burn Our Temple.] //
22, 1984, (34), p. 194.
3072Boguslavskiy. Zametki na polyakh [Marginal Notes] // 22, 1984, (35), p. 125.
3073O. Rapoport. Simptomy odnoy bolezni [Symptoms of One Disease] // 22, 1978, (1), p.
122.
3074L. Tsigelman-Dymerskaya. Sovetskiy antisemitizm prichiny i prognozy [Soviet Anti-
Semitism Causes and Forecasts]: [Seminar] // 22, 1978, (3), p. 173-174.
3075G. Shaked. Trudno li sokhranit izrailskuyu kulturu v konfrontatsii s drugimi kulturami
[Is It Difficult to Preserve Jewish Culture in Confrontation with Other Cultures] // 22,
1982, (23), p. 135.
3076Vl. Jabotinsky. Na lozhnom puti [On a False Road] // Vl. Jabotinsky. Felyetony
[Feuilletons]. Sankt-Petersburg: Tipografiya Gerold [St. Petersburg: Gerold Printing
Establishment], 1913, p. 251, 260-263.
the Jews to avoid Russian politics, literature and art, cautioning that after a
while the Russians would inevitably turn down such service.3077)
Many individual and collective examples, both in Europe and Russia, in the
past and nowadays, illustrate the fragility of Jewish assimilation.
Consider Benjamin Disraeli, the son of a non-religious father; he was
baptized in adolescence and he did not just display the English way of life, he
became no less than the symbol of the British Empire. So, what did he dream
about at leisure, while riding his novel-writing hobby-horse? He wrote about
exceptional merits and Messianism of the Jews, expressed his ardent love to
Palestine, and dreamt of restoring the Israeli homeland!3078
And whats about Gershenzon? He was a prominent historian of Russian
culture and an expert on Pushkin. He was even criticized for his
Slavophilism. But, nevertheless, at the end of his life, he wrote: Accustomed
to European culture from a tender age, I deeply imbibed its spirit and I truly
love many things in it. But deep in my mind I live differently. For many years
a secret voice from within appeals to me persistently and incessantly: This is not
yours! This is not yours! A strange will inside me sorrowfully turns away from
[Russian] culture, from everything happening and spoken around me. I live
like a stranger who has adapted to a foreign country; the natives love me, and I
love them too; I zealously work for their benefit yet I feel I am a stranger,
and I secretly yearn for the fields of my homeland.3079
After this confession of Gershenzon, it is appropriate to formulate the key
thesis of this chapter. There are different types of assimilation: civil and
domestic assimilation, when the assimilated individual is completely immersed
in the surrounding life and accepts the interests of the native nation (in that
sense, the overwhelming majority of Russian, European and American Jews
would perhaps consider themselves assimilated); cultural assimilation; and, at
the extreme, spiritual assimilation, which also happens, albeit rarely. The latter
is more complex and does not result from the former two types of assimilation.
(In the opinion of a critic, The Correspondence between Two Corners by
Vyacheslav Ivanov and M.O. Gershenzon, that small book of tremendous
importance, serves as a proof of the inadequacy of Jewish assimilation, even
in the case of apparently complete cultural assimilation.3080)
Or take another individual, [M. Krol], a revolutionary in his youth and a
converted migr after the revolution, he marvels that the Russian Jews even
in their new countries of emigration demonstrated a huge amount of national
energy and were building an original Jewish culture there. Even in London
the Jews had their own Yiddish schools, their own social organizations, and

3077Vl. Jabotinsky. Chetyre statyi o chirikovskom intsidente [Four Articles on the Chirikov
Incident] (1909) // Ibid., p. 76.
3078TJE, V. 4, p. 560, 566-568.
3079Vyacheslav Ivanov, M.O. Gershenzon. Perepiska iz dvukh uglov [The Correspondence
Between The Two Corners]. Petrograd: Alkonost, 1921, p. 60, 61.
3080O. Rapoport. Simptomy odnoy bolezni [The Symptoms of One Disease] // 22, 1978, (1),
p. 123.
their own solid economics; they did not merge with the English way of life, but
only accommodated to its demands and reinforced the original English Jewry.
(The latter even had their own British Council of Jews, and called themselves
the Jewish community of the Great Britain note that all this was in
England, where Jewish assimilation was considered all but complete.) He
witnessed the same thing in France, and was particularly impressed by the
similar feat in the United States.3081
And there is also that unfailing and reliable Jewish mutual support, that
truly outstanding ability that preserves the Jewish people. Yet it further weakens
the stability of assimilation.
It was not only the rise of Zionism that prompted the Jews to reject
assimilation. The very course of the 20th century was not conductive to
assimilation.
On the eve of World War II in 1939, a true Zionist, Max Brod, wrote: It
was possible to argue in support of the theory of assimilation in the days of far
less advanced statehood of the 19th century, but this theory lost any meaning
in the era when the peoples increasingly consolidate; we, the Jews, will be
inevitably crushed by bellicose nationalistic peoples, unless we take our fate
into our hands and retreat in time.3082
Martin Buber had a very stern opinion on this in 1941: So far, our
existence had served only to shake the thrones of idols, but not to erect the
throne of God. This is exactly why our existence among other nations is so
mysterious. We purport to teach others about the absolute, but in reality we just
say no to other nations, or, perhaps, we are actually nothing more than just the
embodiment of such negation. This is why we have turned into the nightmare of
the nations.3083
Then, two deep furrows, the Catastrophe and the emergence of Israel soon
afterwards, crossed the course of Jewish history, shedding new and very bright
light on the problem of assimilation.
Arthur Koestler clearly formulated and expressed his thoughts on the
significance of the state of Israel for world Jewry in his book Promise and
Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949 and in an article, Judah at the Crossroads.
An ardent Zionist in his youth, Koestler left Vienna for a Palestinian
kibbutz in 1926; he worked for a few years in Jerusalem as a Hebrew-writing
columnist for Jabotinskys newspaper; he also reported for several German
newspapers. And then he wrote: If we exclude from the Jewish religion the
mystical craving for the Promised Land, then the very basis and essence of this
religion would disappear. And further, after the restoration of the Jewish state,
most of the Jewish prayers, rites and symbols lost their meaning. The God of
3081M. Krol. Natsionalizm i assimilyatsiya v evreyskoy istorii [Nationalism and Assimilation in
the Jewish History] // JW-1, p. 191-193.
3082Max Brod. Lyubov na rasstoyanii [Love at a Distance] // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (11), p. 198-
199.
3083Martin Buber. Natsionalnye bogi i Bog Izrailya [The National Gods and the God of
Israel] // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1976, (4), p. 117.
Israel has abided by the treaty; he had returned the land of Canaan to Abrahams
seed. If, however, [the religious Jew] defies the order to return to the land of
his ancestors and thus violates the treaty, he consequently anathematizes
himself and loses his Jewishness. On the other hand, it may be difficult for not
very religious Jews to understand why they should make sacrifices to preserve
Jewish values not included in the religious doctrine. The [Jewish] religion
loses any sense if you continue to pray about the return to Zion even after you
have grimly determined not to go there. A painful choice, yes, but the choice
that must be made immediately, for the sake of the next generation. Do I want
to move to Israel? If I do not, then what right do I have to continue calling
myself a Jew and thus to mark my children with the stigma of isolation? The
whole world would sincerely welcome the assimilation of the Jews, and after
three generations or so, the Jewish question would fade away.3084
The London newspaper Jewish Chronicle objected to Koestler: perhaps, it
is much better, much more reasonable and proper for a Jew from the Diaspora
to live as before, at the same time helping to build the State of Israel? Yet
Koestler remained adamant: They want both to have their cake and eat it. This
is the route to disaster.3085
Yet all previous attempts at assimilation ended in failure; so why it should
be different this time? argued the newspaper. Koestler replied: Because all
previous attempts of assimilation were based on the wrong assumption that the
Jews could be adequate sons of the host nation, while at the same time
preserving their religion and remaining the Chosen people. But ethnic
assimilation is impossible if Judaism is preserved; and conversely Judaism
collapses in case of ethnic assimilation. Jewish religion perpetuates the national
isolation there is nothing you can do about this fact. Therefore, before the
restoration of Israel, the renunciation of ones Jewish identity was equivalent to
refusal to support the persecuted and could be regarded as a cowardly
surrender. But now, we are talking not about surrender, but about a free
choice.3086
Thus, Koestler offered a tough choice to the Diaspora Jews: to become
Israelis or to stop being Jews. He himself took the latter path. 3087 (Needless to
say, Jews in the Diaspora met Koestlers conclusions mainly with angry
criticism.)
Yet those who had chosen the first option, the citizens of the State of Israel,
obtained a new support and, from that, a new view at this eternal problem. For
instance, a modern Israeli author writes sharply: The Galut Jew is an immoral
creature. He uses all the benefits of his host country but at the same time he
does not fully identify with it. These people demand the status which no other
3084Artur Koestler. Iuda na pereputye [Judah at the Crossroads] // EW, Tel-Aviv, 1978, (33), p.
104-107, 110.
3085Ibid., p. 112.
3086Ibid., p. 117, 126.
3087V. Boguslavskiy. Galutu s nadezhdoy [To the Galuth with Hope] // 22, 1985, (40), p.
135.
nation in the world has to be allowed to have two homelands: the one, where
they currently live, and another one, where their heart lives. And after that they
still wonder why they are hated!3088
And they do wonder a lot: Why, why are the Jews so disliked (true, the
Jews are disliked, this is fact; otherwise, why strive for liberation?)? And from
what? Apparently, not from our Jewishness. We know very well that we
should liberate ourselves, it is absolutely necessary, though we still cannot
tell exactly what from.3089
A natural question what should we do to be loved is seldom asked.
Jewish authors usually see the whole world as hostile to them, and so they give
way to grief: The world is now split into those who sympathize with the
Jewish people, and those seeking to destroy the Jewish people. 3090 Sometimes,
there is proud despair: It is humiliating to rely on the authorities for the
protection from the nation which dislikes you; it is humiliating to thank
ingratiatingly the best and worthiest of this nation, who put in a good word for
you.3091
Another Israeli disagrees: In reality, this world is not solely divided on the
grounds of ones attitude toward Jews, as we sometimes think owing to our
excessive sensitivity. A. Voronel agrees: The Jews pay too much attention to
anti-Semites, and too little to themselves.3092
Israel, the Jewish state, must become the center that secures the future of
world Jewry. As early as in the 1920s no other than Albert Einstein wrote to no
other than Pyotr Rutenberg, a former Social Revolutionary and possibly the
main author of the revolutionary demands of January 9, 1905 (he accompanied
Orthodox Father Gapon during the workers procession on that date but was
later one of his executioners; still later, Rutenberg left Russia to rebuild
Palestine): First of all, your [Palestinian settlers] lives must be protected,
because you sacrifice yourselves for the sake of the Spirit and in the name the
entire Jewish nation. We must demonstrate that we are a nation with the will to
live and that we are strong enough for the great accomplishment that would
consolidate our people and protect our future generations. For us and for our
posterity, the State must become as precious as the Temple was for our
ancestors.3093

3088A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // 22, 1982, (27), p. 159.
3089Yu. Viner. Khochetsya osvoboditsya [I Want to Become Free] // 22, 1983, (32), p. 204-
205.
3090M. Goldshteyn. Mysli vslukh [Thoughts Aloud] // Russkaya mysl [Russian Thinker], 1968,
February 29, p. 5.
3091M. Kaganskaya. Nashe gostepriimstvo [Our Hospitality] // 22, 1990, (70), p. 111.
3092A. Voronel. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Back in Reflection]: [Round Table] // 22,
1982, (24), p. 131.
3093A. Chernyak. Neizvestnoye pismo Einshteyna [The Unknown Letter of Einstein] // 22,
1994, (92), p. 212.
 Jewish authors support this conviction in many ways: The Jewish
problem, apparently, has no reliable solution without the Jewish state.3094
Israel is the center that guarantees the future of the Jews of the whole
world.3095 Israel is the only correct place for Jews, one where their historical
activity does not result in historical fiasco.3096
And only a rumble coming from that tiny and endlessly beleaguered
country betrays the phantom of the Catastrophe, permanently imprinted in the
collective unconscious of the Israelis.3097

And what is the status of assimilation, the Diaspora, and Israel today?
By the 1990s, assimilation had advanced very far. For example, for 80-
90% of the American Jews, the modern tendencies of the Jewish life promise
gradual assimilation. This holds true not only for the United States: Jewish
life gradually disappears from most of the Diaspora communities. Most
modern-day Jews do not have painful memories of the Catastrophe. They
identify with Israel much less than their parents. Doubtlessly, the role of the
Diaspora is shrinking disastrously, and this is fraught with inevitable loss of its
essential characteristics. Will our grandchildren remain Jews? Will the
Diaspora survive the end of this millennium and, if so, for how long? Rabbi
Adin Steinsaltz, one of the greatest teachers of our time warns that the Jews
of the Diaspora are no longer a group, whose survival is guaranteed by being in
jeopardy. And because of that, they, paradoxically, are already on the road to
extinction, participating in the Catastrophe of self-destruction. Moreover,
anti-Semitism in Western countries cannot be anymore considered as the
element that strengthens Jewish identity. Anti-Semitic discrimination in politics,
business, universities, private clubs, etc. is for all practical purposes
eliminated.3098 In present-day Europe there are many Jews who do not identify
as Jews and who react idiosyncratically to any attempt to connect them with that
artificial community. The assimilated Jew does not want to feel like a Jew; he
casts away the traits of his race (according to Sartre). 3099 The same author
offers a scorching assessment: European Jews reject their Jewishness; they
think it is anti-Semitism that compels them to be the Jews. Yet that is a
contradiction: A Jew identifies as a Jew only when he is in danger. Then he
3094A. Katsenelenboygen. Antisemitizm i evreyskoye gosudarstvo [Anti-Semitism and the
Jewish State] // 22, 1989, (64), p. 180.
3095I. Libler. Izrail diaspora: Krizis identifikatsii [Israel the Diaspora: The Crisis of
Identification] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 168.
3096N. Gutina. Dvusmyslennaya svyaz [An Ambiguous Connection] // 22, 1981, (19), p.
124.
3097M. Kaganskaya. Mif protiv realnosti [Myth Against Reality] // 22, 1988, (58), p. 141.
3098I. Libler. Izrail diaspora [Israel the Diaspora] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 149-150,
154, 157.
3099Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lgen: Ruland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin:
Siedler Verlag, 1992, S. 95, 99.
escapes as a Jew. But when he himself becomes the source of danger, he is not a
Jew.3100
Thus, the contours of the collapse of the Diaspora take shape exactly when
the Western Jews enjoy freedom and wealth unprecedented in Jewish history,
and when they are, or appear to be, stronger than ever. And if the current
trends do not change, most of the Diaspora will simply disappear. We have to
admit a real possibility of the humiliating, though voluntary, gradual
degradation of the Diaspora. Arthur Koestler, the advocate of assimilation,
who in the 1950s predicted the death of the Diaspora, might prove to be right
after all.3101
Meanwhile, the Jews of the world, sometimes even to their own surprise,
feel like they are personally involved in the destiny of Israel. If, God forbid,
Israel is destroyed, then the Jews in other countries will disappear too. I cannot
explain why, but the Jews will not survive the second Catastrophe in this
century.3102 Another author attributes the Jewish mythology of the imminent
Catastrophe precisely to life in the Diaspora, and this is why American (and
Soviet) Jews often express such opinions. They prepare for the Catastrophe:
should Israel fall, it will be they who will carry on the Jewish nation. 3103 Thus,
almost all of many hypotheses attempting to explain the purpose of Jewish
Diaspora recognize that it makes Jewry nearly indestructible; it guarantees
Jewry eternal life within the limits of the existence of mankind.3104
We also encounter quite a bellicose defense of the principle of Diaspora.
American professor Leonard Fayne said: We oppose the historical demand to
make aliyah. We do not feel like we are in exile. In June 1994 the President of
the World Jewish Congress, Shoshana S. Cardin, aggressively announced to the
Israelis: We are not going to become the forage for aliyah to Israel, and we
doubt you have any idea about the richness and harmony of American Jewish
life.3105 Others state: We are interesting for the peoples of the world not
because of peculiarities of our statehood, but because of our Diaspora which is
widely recognized as one of the greatest wonders of world history. 3106 Others
are rather ironic: One rogue came up with the elegant excuse that the
choseness of the Jews is allegedly nothing else but to be eternally
scattered.3107 The miracle of the restoration of Israel post factum gave new

3100S. Margolina. Germaniya i evrei: vtoraya popytka [Germany and the Jews: The Second
Attempt] // Strana i mir [The Country and the World], 1991, (3), p. 143.
3101I. Libler. Izrail diaspora [Israel the Diaspora] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 150, 155.
3102N. Podgorets. Evreyi v sovremennom mire [The Jews in the Modern World]: [Interview] //
EW, New York, 1985, (86), p. 113, 120
3103Z. Bar-Sella. Islamskiy fundamentalizm i evreyskoye gosudarstvo [Islamic
Fundamentalism and the Jewish State] // 22, 1988, (58), p. 182-184.
3104E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galuth with Love] // 22, 1985, (40), p. 112.
3105I. Libler. Izrail diaspora [Israel the Diaspora] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 152.
3106E. Fishteyn. Glyadim nazad my bez boyazni [We Are Looking Back with No Fear] //
22, 1984, No. 39, p. 135.
3107A. Voronel. Oglyanis v razdumye [Look Back in Reflection]: [Round Table] // 22,
1982, (24), p. 118.
meaning to the Diaspora; simultaneously, it had brilliantly concluded the story
that could otherwise drag on. In short, it had crowned the miracle of the
Diaspora. It crowned it, but did not abolish it. 3108 Yet it is ironic too, as the
goals for which we struggled so hard and which filled us with such pride and
feeling of difference, are already achieved.3109
Understanding the fate of the Diaspora and any successful prediction of its
future largely depends on the issue of mixed marriages. Intermarriage is the
most powerful and irreversible mechanism of assimilation. (It is no accident
that such unions are so absolutely forbidden in the Old Testament: They have
dealt faithlessly with the Lord; for they have borne alien children. (Hosea 5:7))
When Arnold J. Toynbee proposed intermarriage as a means to fight anti-
Semitism, hundreds of rabbis opposed him: Mass mixed marriage means the
end of Jewry.3110
A dramatic growth of mixed marriages is observed in the Western
countries: Data documenting the statistics of dissolution are chilling. In the
1960s mixed marriages accounted for approximately 6% of Jewish marriages
in the United States, the home of the largest Jewish community in the world.
Today [in 1990s], only one generation later, this number reached 60% a ten-
fold increase. The share of mixed marriages in Europe and Latin America is
approximately the same. Moreover, apart from the orthodox Jews, almost all
Jewish families in Western countries have an extremely low birth rate. In
addition, only a small minority of children from mixed families are willing to
adopt a distinctly Jewish way of life.3111
And what about Russia? The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia provides the
following statistics: in 1988 [still under the Soviet regime], in the RSFSR
(Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic), 73% of married Jewish men, and
63% of married Jewish women had non-Jewish spouses (in 1978 these numbers
were lower: 13% for men, and 20% for women.). Actually, Jews in such
marriages tend to lose their Jewish self-consciousness much faster; they more
often identify themselves with other nationalities during census.3112
Thus, almost everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree, we have the
erosion of Jewish life, dilution of racial, religious and ethnic borders that,
until recently, served as the barriers for assimilation and `intermarriage.
Today, when common anti-Semitism declined so abruptly, the Jews have
lost a many great principles that in past used to be strong pillars of self-
identification.3113

3108E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galuth with Love] // 22, 1985, (40), p. 114.
3109I. Libler. Izrail diaspora [Israel the Diaspora] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 156.
3110Ed Norden. Pereschityvaya evreyev* [Recounting the Jews] // 22, 1991, (79), p. 126.
3111I. Libler. Izrail diaspora [Israel the Diaspora] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 151, 152.
3112Kratkaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya [The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia]: Jerusalem:
Obshchestvo po issledovaniyu evreyskikh obshchin [Society for Study of Jewish
Communities], 1996, V. 8, p. 303, Table 15.
3113I. Libler. Izrail diaspora [Israel the Diaspora] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 156.
 The Jews of the Diaspora are often attacked by the Israelis. Thirty and forty
years after the creation of the State of Israel, the Israelis ask Diaspora Jews
mockingly and sometimes angrily: So, what about modern Jews? Most likely,
they will always remain in their true historical home, in the Galuth. 3114 The
Algerian Jews had preferred France to Israel, and then the majority of the
Iranian Jews, who left Khomeinis rule, gave a wide berth to Israel. By pulling
up stakes, they search for countries with higher standards of living, and a higher
level of civilization. The love of Zion is not sufficient in itself. 3115 The eternal
image of a classical imminent catastrophe does not attract the Jews to Israel
anymore.3116 The Jews are a nation corrupted by their stateless and ahistoric
existence.3117 The Jews did not pass the test. They still do not want to return to
their homeland. They prefer to stay in Galut and complain about anti-Semitism
every time they are criticized. And nobody may say a bad word about Israel,
because to criticize Israel is anti-Semitism! If they are so concerned about
Israel, why do they not move here to live? But no, this is exactly what they try
to avoid!3118 Most of the Jews of the world have already decided that they do
not want to be independent. Look at the Russian Jews. Some of them wanted
independence, while others preferred to continue the life of a mite on the
Russian dog. And when the Russian dog had become somewhat sick and angry,
they have turned to the American dog. After all, the Jews lived that way for two
thousand years.3119
And now, the the Diaspora Jew is often nervous when confronted by an
Israeli; he would rather feel guilty than share his fate with Israel. This sense
of inferiority is compensated by intensely maintaining his Jewish identity
through deliberate over-emphasizing of petty Jewish symbolism. At the same
time, the Jew from the Diaspora alone shoulders the specific risk of
confronting surrounding anti-Semitism. Yet, no matter how the Israel
behaves, the Diaspora has no choice: it will quietly stand behind the Israelis like
an unloved but faithful wife.3120
It was forecasted that by 2021, the Diaspora will probably shrink by
another million souls. The interior workings of Jewish history indicate that,
most likely, the size of world Jewry will further decrease with the gradual
concentration of a Jewish majority in Zion and not in the Diaspora.3121

3114N. Gutina. Dvusmyslennaya svyaz [An Ambiguous Connection] // 22, 1981, (19), p.
125.
3115S. Tsiryulnikov. Filosofiya evreyskoy anomalii [Philosophy of Jewish Anomaly] // EW, New
York, 1984, (77), p. 148.
3116I. Libler. Izrail diaspora [Israel the Diaspora] // 22, 1995, (95), p. 165.
3117Z. Bar-Sella. Islamskiy fundamentalizm i evreyskoye gosudarstvo [Islamic Fundamentalism
and the Jewish State] // 22, 1988, (58), p. 184.
3118A.-B. Yoshua. Golos pisatelya [Voice of the Writer] // 22, 1982, (27), p. 158.
3119Beni Peled. Soglasheniye ne s tem partnyorom [Agreement with the Wrong Partner] //
22, 1983, (30), p. 125.
3120E. Fishteyn. Iz galuta s lyubovyu [From the Galuth with Love] // 22, 1985, (40), p. 115,
116.
 Yet couldnt it be the other way around? Maybe, after all, the Russian Jew
Josef Bikerman was right when he confidently claimed that the Diaspora is
indestructible? I accept Galut, where we have lived for two thousand years,
where we have developed strong cohesion, and where we must live henceforth,
to live and prove ourselves.3122 Could it be that those two voices which,
according to Gershenzon, always sound in Jewish ears one calling to mix
with the surroundings, and another demanding to preserve Jewish national
uniqueness, will sound forever?
A reputable historian noted (after World War II) a paradox in the life of
modern Jewry: ever-growing immersion of Jews in the life of other nations does
not diminish their national identity and sometimes even intensifies it.3123
Below are few testimonies made by Russian Jews during the Soviet
(internationalist) period.
I always had an acute perception of my Jewishness. From the age of 17,
when I left the cradle of high school, I mixed in circles where the Jewish
question was central. My father had a very strong Jewish spirit; despite that,
he never observed traditions, Mitzvoth, did not know the language, and yet
everything, that he, a Jew, knew, was somehow subordinated to his Jewish
identity.3124
A writer from Odessa, Arkady Lvov, remembers: When I was a 10-year
old boy, I searched for the Jews among scientists, writers, politicians, and first
of all, as a Young Pioneer [a communist youth group in the former Soviet
Union], I looked for them among the members of government. Lazar
Kaganovich was in third place, ahead of Voroshilov and Kalinin, and I was
proud of Stalins minister Kaganovich I was proud of Sverdlov, I was proud
of Uritsky And I was proud of Trotsky yes, yes, of Trotsky! He thought
that Ostermann (the adviser of Peter the Great) was a Jew, and when he found
that Ostermann actually was German, he had a feeling of disappointment, a
feeling of loss, but he was openly proud that Shafirov was a Jew.3125
Yet there were many Jews in Russia who were not afraid to merge with the
bulk of the assimilating body,3126 who devotedly espoused Russian culture:
In the old days, only a handful of Jews experienced this: Antokolsky,
Levitan, Rubinstein, and a few others. Later there were more of them. Oh,
theyve fathomed Russia so deeply with their ancient and refined intuition of
3121Ed Norden. Pereschityvaya evreyev [Recounting the Jews] // 22, 1991, (79), p. 120,
130-131.
3122I.M. Bikerman. K samopoznaniyu evreya [To the Self-Knowledge of a Jew]. Ibid., p. 62.
3123Sh. Ettinger. Noveyshiy period [Modern Period] // Istoriya evreyskogo naroda [History of
the Jewish Nation] / Sh. Ettinger (Ed.). Jerusalem: Gesharim; Moscow: Mosty kultury
[Bridges of Culture], 2001, p. 587.
3124A. Eterman. Tretye pokoleniye [The Third Generation] [Interview] // 22, 1986, (47), p.
123-124.
3125A. Lvov. Vedi za soboy otsa svoyego [Lead the Way to Your Father] // EW, New York,
1980, (52), p. 183-184.
3126Vl. Jabotinsky. Na lozhnom puti [On the Wrong Road] // Vl. Jabotinsky. Felyetony
[Feuilletons]. Ibid., p. 251.
heart and mind! Theyve perceived her shimmering, her enigmatic play of light
and darkness, her struggles and sufferings. Russia attracted their hearts with her
dramatic fight between good and evil, with her thunderstorms and weaknesses,
with her strengths and charms. But several decades ago, not a mere handful, but
thousands Jews entered Russian culture. And many of them began to identify
sincerely as Russians in their souls, thoughts, tastes and habits. Yet there is
still something in the Jewish soul a sound, a dissonance, a small crack
something very small, but through it, eventually, distrust, mockery and hostility
leaks from the outside, while from the inside some ancient memory works away.
So who am I? Who am I? Am I Russian?
No, no. I am a Russian Jew.3127
Indeed, assimilation apparently has some insurmountable limits. That
explains the difference between full spiritual assimilation and cultural
assimilation, and all the more so, between the former and widespread civic and
social assimilation. Jews fatefully for Jewry preserve their identity despite
all outward signs of successful assimilation, they preserve the inner Jewish
character (Solomon Lurie).
The wish to fully merge with the rest of mankind, in spite of all strict
barriers of the Law seems natural and vivid. But is it possible? Even in the 20th
century some Jews believed that the unification of the mankind is the ideal of
Judaic Messianism.3128 But is it really so? Did such an ideal ever exist?
Far more often, we hear vigorous objections to it: Nobody will convince
or compel me to renounce my Jewish point of view, or to sacrifice my Jewish
interests for the sake of some universal idea, be it proletarian internationalism,
(the one we idiots believed in the 1920s) or Great Russia, or the triumph of
Christianity, or the benefit of all mankind, and so on.3129
Nearly assimilated non-Zionist and non-religious Jewish intellectuals often
demonstrate a totally different attitude. For instance, one highly educated
woman with broad political interests, T.M.L., imparted to me in Moscow in
1967 that it would be horrible to live in an entirely Jewish milieu. The most
precious trait of our nation is cosmopolitanism. It would be horrible if all Jews
would gather in one militarist state. It is totally incomprehensible for
assimilated Jews. I objected timidly: But it cannot be a problem for the
assimilated Jews as they are not Jews anymore. She replied: No, we still have
some [Jewish] genes in us.
Yet it is not about the fatality of origin, blood or genes, it is about which
pain Jewish pain or that of the host nation is closer to ones heart. Alas,
nationality is more than just knowledge of language, or an introduction to the
culture, or even an attachment to the nature and way of life of the country. There
is another dimension in it that of the commonality of historic destiny,
3127Rani Aren. V russkom galute [In the Russian Galuth] // 22, 1981, (19), p. 135-136.
3128G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney: Zapiski russkogo evreya [The Things of Days
Bygone: The Memoirs of a Russian Jew]: 3 volumes. Paris, 1933-1934, V. 1, p. 4.
3129Sh. Markish. Eshchyo raz o nenavisti k samomu sebe [Once Again on the Hate to
Yourself] // 22, 1980, (16), p. 189.
determined for each individual by his involvement in the history and destiny of
his own people. While for others this involvement is predetermined by birth, for
the Jew it is largely a question of personal choice, that of a hard choice.3130
So far, assimilation has not been very convincing. All those who proposed
various ways for universal assimilation have failed. The difficult problem of
assimilation persists. And though on a global scale the process of assimilation
has advanced very far, it by no means foredooms the Diaspora.
Even Soviet life could not produce a fully assimilated Jew, the one who
would be assimilated at the deepest, psychological level.3131 And, as a Jewish
author concludes, Wherever you look, you will find insoluble Jewish residue in
the assimilated liquid.3132
Yet individual cases of deep assimilation with bright life histories do occur.
And we in Russia welcome them wholeheartedly.

A Russian Jew A Jew, a Russian. So much blood and tears have been
shed around this boundary, so much unspeakable torment with no end in sight
piled up. Yet, at the same time, we have also witnessed much joy of spiritual
and cultural growth. There were and still are numerous Jews who decide to
shoulder that heavy cross: to be a Russian Jew, and at the same time, a Russian.
Two affections, two passions, two struggles. Isnt it too much for one heart?
Yes, it is too much. But this is exactly where the fatal tragedy of this dual
identity is. Dual identity is not really an identity. The balance here is not an
innate but rather an acquired entity.3133 That reflection on the pre-revolutionary
Russia was written in 1927 in the Paris emigration.
Some fifty years later, another Jew, who lived in Soviet Russia and later
emigrated to Israel, looked back and wrote: We, the Jews who grew up in
Russia, are a weird cross the Russian Jews. Others say that we are Jews by
nationality and Russians by culture. Yet is it possible to change your culture and
nationality like a garment? When an enormous press drives one metal into
another, they cannot be separated, not even by cutting. For decades we were
pressed together under a huge pressure. My national identity is expressed in my
culture. My culture coalesced with my nationality. Please separate one from
another. I am also curious which cells of my soul are of the Russian color and
which are of the Jewish one. Yet there was not only pressure, not only a forced
fusion. There was also an unexpected affinity between these intercrossing

3130L. Tsigelman-Dymerskaya. Sovetskiy antisemitizm prichiny i prognozy [Soviet Anti-

Semitism Causes and Forecasts]: [Seminar] // 22, 1978, (3), p. 175.
3131Yu. Shtern. Dvoynaya otvetstvennost [Double Responsibility] // 22, 1981, (21), p. 127.
3132O. Rapoport. Simptomy odnoy bolezni [Symptoms of One Disease] // 22, 1978, (1), p.
123.
3133St. Ivanovich. Semyon Yushkevich i evreyi [Semyon Yushkevich and the Jews] /
Publikatsiya Ed. Kapitaykina [Publication of Ed. Kapitaykin] // Evrei v kulture Russkogo
Zarubezhya [The Jews in the Russian-Language Culture]. Jerusalem, 1992, V. 1, p. 29.
origins, at some deep spiritual layers. It was as if they supplemented each other
to a new completeness: like space supplements time, the spiritual breadth
supplements the spiritual depth, and the acceptance supplements the negation;
and there was a mutual jealousy about `choseness. Therefore, I do not have two
souls, which quarrel with each other, weaken each other, and split me in two. I
have one soul and it is not two-faced, not divided in two, and not mixed. It is
just one.3134
And the response from Russia: I believe that the contact of the Jewish and
Slavic souls in Russia was not a coincidence; there was some purpose in it.3135

3134[R. Nudelman] Kolonka redaktora [Editors Column] // 22, 1979, (7), p. 95-96.
3135L-skiy. Pisma iz Rossii [Letters from Russia] // 22, 1981, (21), p. 150.
 Authors afterword

In 1990, while finishing April 1917 and sorting out the enormous amount of
material not included in The Red Wheel, I decided to present some of that
material in the form of a historical essay about Jews in the Russian revolution.
Yet it became clear almost immediately that in order to understand those
events the essay must step back in time. Thus, it stepped back to the very first
incorporation of the Jews into the Russian Empire in 1772. On the other hand,
the revolution of 1917 provided a powerful impetus to Russian Jewry, so the
essay naturally stretched into the post-revolutionary period. Thus, the title Two
Hundred Years Together was born.
However, it took time for me to realize the importance of that distinct
historical boundary drawn by mass emigration of the Jews from the Soviet
Union that had begun in the 1970s (exactly 200 years after the Jews appeared in
Russia) and which had become unrestricted by 1987. This boundary had been
abolished, so that for the first time, the non-voluntary status of the Russian Jews
no longer a fact: they ought not to live here anymore; Israel waits for them; all
countries of the world are open to them. This clear boundary changed my
intention to keep the narrative up to the mid-1990s, because the message of the
book was already played out: the uniqueness of Russian-Jewish entwinement
disappeared at the moment of the new Exodus.
Now, a totally new period in the history of the by-now-free Russian Jewry
and its relations with the new Russia began. This period started with swift and
essential changes, but it is still too early to predict its long-term outcomes and
judge whether its peculiar Russian-Jewish character will persevere or it will be
supplanted with the universal laws of the Jewish Diaspora. To follow the
evolution of this new development is beyond the lifespan of this author.